One thing that I would really like to see is a sort of hybrid between Factorio and a colony type game. Imagine that instead of crash landing by yourself, you crash land with an entire group of people that you have to protect and provide for while you bootstrap yourself up to getting everybody off planet. For those who don't like biters, it can provide another means of making pollution matter. For those who do, it adds another interesting complication.
Along with that, I'd like to see more green energy. Wind power, for instance, could be an early game technology that competes with boilers. Naturally it would need to cost more and / or produce less. Perhaps also geothermal power that must be generated at a particular location.
Of course, more could be done with water. Boats, offshore resources, aquatic biters? Depletion of water resources so you don't have a one tile pond cooling 4 nuclear reactors? Or making the water less useful the more polluted it is.
I wouldn't mind pollution having additional effects. I mean it could make solar panels less efficient. In addition to the existing effects of making everything look like shit, long term climate change might be an option.
Or weather, for that matter. Adding snow weather would be a big job (snowy variants for all sprites), but causing nuclear winter from using nukes, or ash snow from burning the forests, or everything going sooty from the coal or glowy from radiation would be a really nice addition. Not much in terms of game depth though, I guess.
Make solar power long-term preferable because of ecologic reasons and then add snow in winter and dust storms in summer[0], so now you have to clean the panels ;).
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[0] - Assuming they can coexist in the same geographical location, IANAGeologist.
Minecraft with bots you could program was good fun and sounds like a similar vibe, I think I used ComputerCraft. You program turtle-bots with Lua to do mining/resource gathering/etc..
Along with that, I'd like to see more green energy. Wind power, for instance, could be an early game technology that competes with boilers. Naturally it would need to cost more and / or produce less. Perhaps also geothermal power that must be generated at a particular location.
Of course, more could be done with water. Boats, offshore resources, aquatic biters? Depletion of water resources so you don't have a one tile pond cooling 4 nuclear reactors? Or making the water less useful the more polluted it is.
So many possibilities.