Wernstrom

New and casual players will be conservative and only work with the safest currency(s) which should make the governments try to be as honest and safe as possible, if they want more players. Serious players will have another game to play: foreign exchange and arbitrage. The "craziness going on with scams and pirates and tycoons" would mostly involve the serious players. I think this will bring players together because they depend on the same money. It would be huge force in the game that makes governments much more important. Alliances will involve financial issues. It would also help players see other governments and other players as "other" because they're part of a different system.

Money should be created by the players, just like real world money is created by governments (or bitcoin.) Then the civilizations that players make would matter to everyone -- can you trust their money? This is also the way American banking was in in the 1800s as the US expanded into the west. Much more fun to have players making money and banks and craziness going on with scams and pirates and tycoons. The big problem is that NQ wants to have their own currency that can be exchanged for game time. If the official currency is safe... why use anything else?

Using the power of gravity at a planetary scale would be awesome. The shields for a claimed area could be "gravity sinks" that absorb energy and funnel it into the planet. This could be why you can't build on small moons or asteroids. Ships could also have small gravity sinks that allow them to land on a planet and logout keeping the ship safe (if NQ want's to allow that.) My favorite idea would be having a "gravity pump" that lifts ships into orbit. I think they should be super expensive to build and have delay, like a timer or a battery that needs to charge. Chemical liftoff and gravity pumps together would increase the strategy of ship design -- do you want to depend on a gravity pump being available or carry the weight and fuel?