I always feel like games like this die in the late-game. Once you've had fun with the exploring and are collecting resource units for the nth millionth time, the game kind of runs its course.

It would be far more interesting if, as you play, you can participate in a large economy, slowly growing your gameplay experience out from say, a single guy mining and selling minerals on a planet, to an galactic empire.

Even better if you could participate at just about any part of the virtual economy, buying, selling, crafting, shipping, policing, fighting, robbing, pirating. You could own a store on a space station or a repair shop, make enough and buy a ship, or buy a station. Now you're managing station ops.

Exploration is just one of the X's in 4x, and I feel like there's so much untapped potential in the genre.