Hey, thanks for your feedback! Don't hesitate to say what you have in mind for balance, ideas etc. It's never too early!
Here goes!
Balance:
- ships+spaceport passive XP are OP, I never lost a battle. Maybe enemies should scale way higher so that good systems take a bit of work.
- overclocks: underpowered IMO. Maybe with other tiers that would work at larger scales? (planet / terraformed planet / system / galaxy / cluster)
- solar panels: never used them, by the time I get to high luminosity systems there's no point
- manual mining: the mantle and core only yielding stone is disappointing ; yields in general are too low to make this useful except at the very beginning (maybe an infinite research item to improve them? or some kind of rare bonuses)
Underutilized features:
- rovers: it's good they're not mandatory (not everyone will enjoy driving one around) but they don't have much appeal for now. I'm not sure that simply scaling up the current rewards would fix it. Maybe some more unique bonuses? For example a temporary boost to energy/minerals that would take them way above the storage limit, then quickly decay back to the limit.
- many atoms seem useless, except as a source for particles (and that's tedious). Wild suggestion: have some unique buildings generate "quests" to use them (e.g. provide some amount of elements X, Y Z and get some nice reward for it).
Things that work:
- cellulose: it can be a total pain to gather enough, and that's kind of a good thing. It introduces variation and above all gives a reason to explore more systems and find those precious synthesizers.
- progression rate: a tad easy at times, but it's great to never feel entirely stalled.
Things I'd like to see:
- star lifters: saw that concept in an Isaac Arthur video ; it's a megastructure that leeches off matter from a star. It would yield mostly hydrogen but also trace amounts of all elements present in the system.
- display lifetime production of buildings, especially for boring/mining/atmosphere extraction
- more mid-game contents (I didn't start a new dimension so can't really speak about endgame): once one can easily kill galaxies, there isn't much to do with the resources. Maybe some (very very expensive) way to send some aid to one's other universes?
- more incentives for prestige: maybe have some objectives that are visible but impossible to reach in base universe or dimension? I dunno, like cluster-level terastructures requiring vast amounts of exotic materials (I could see such a building *slowly* converting every galaxy into the same type of gigastructure)
- more unique buildings + tiers, to make exploration even more worthwhile