What do I mean by that? Let me highlight the main points.
- Allow (re)initiating combat with neutral/friendly ships, or ones that surrendered. Weapons do not charge before you do this, and opponent's FTL does, usually with the intention of jumping away. Also, this resets your insta-FTL to previous state. Sometimes, initiating combat in this way might result in an event, such as what you did being broadcast, causing a harder encounter, or the ship helping the rebels if it escapes. Maybe a shop will refuse to deal with you.
- Allow the player to surrender, and choose from small/medium/big amounts of resources to surrender, success being dependent on them. Sometimes enemy ships request a weapon, or a drone that you have. Slavers might want someone from your crew.
- Looting. Enemy ships have scrap, fuel, missiles, drone parts in cargo, sometimes also weapons or drones. When a ship surrenders, it gives you some, but not all of it. When you destroy a ship, some of it is destroyed, some lost, sometimes weapons or drones are converted into scrap. The only question is how to balance boarding, then?
- Show merchant ships as well, and similarly, allow attacking them, have them heavily armed(above current sector's tier), and the reverse - allow trading with non-merchant ships, if they agree, make prices worse, sometimes more, sometimes less, no repair, and fuel/missiles/drone depend on stock.
In other words, to put it simply, allow doing anything with any ship, and leave only actual event-ish stuff to events.
Just some random ramblings of mine, now I've got to go sleep x.x
