Hey guys, great reading this :) Wc9903, just keep playing the game, pitching ideas if you have them, it means a lot to me. I'm not doing this to make money, this is not my job, hearing from happy fans and continuing to play with this thing is the reason I do it. So far I'm not bored, one day I probably will be, but hearing things like what you say keeps that day still some way in the future :)
Chromewing: I think in terms of making a game like Galimulator commercially viable, what I would do is focus much more on the gameplay aspects, and then adding some large scale simulation including sandboxing as an afterthought. I think you'd end up with a game that is mostly like 1000 other 5x games, with some extra fancy sandbox buttons that 10% of the players ever use. Would adding those extra simulation features be commercially justifiable? I doubt it.
Galimulator is the reverse, I just want to see what happens if you let empires loose, throw in some monsters, have people in there and see how they advance in their careers, etc etc. Being able to play the game itself is an afterthought (at first I didn't even want a pause button!), but it does admittedly create some interesting things. But if I want to make nice scenarios, missions, space combat UI, whatever, to lure in large scale players, then I'm afraid I will need to sacrifice something in the simulation itself.
If there is some golden middle ground in there, where you get the best of both worlds, and there may be, then a one man team like me is not enough to find it, design it, implement it, market, monetize it etc etc.
So I'm not going for that, I'm just doing what I think is fun, and we'll see how that goes :)
Thanks for the very interesting write-up! Oh, and good luck with your games!