pd wrote:i think the main question first is, do we have battles on system or planet scale?
That's relatively cosmetic / trivial decision. I think what drek's getting at is the really basic stuff... like:
Do we need to have some sort of RTS fleet battle minigame?
Does the player need to control it, or can the game simulate and display or report the results?
What level of control does the player need? Is just agressive/defensive/retreat settings ok, or do you need to be able to give specific orders?
Do we need to keep track of much information about individual units (ie. ships or fleets, depending what they player controls or what is displayed to the player, independent of the number of "individual ships"), or can they just be either alive or dead (or equivalent)?
Do ships need to be able to have different kinds of weapons in an interesting and complicated (= hard to implement and balance) web of counters, or can it be literally rock paper scissors?
Do we need to be able to design ships, or can a few premade stock ship types be sufficient?
(And any other issues I've not mentioned...)
Any additional complexity quickly spirals and compounds and there's a real risk of the game never getting done if things are designed too complicated... And there's also the issues of whether the game benefits from the additional complexity in any given case, in both hard-to-quantify fun-ness, and issues relating the designing and easily implementing a practical UI with limited resources to do so.
EDIT: And remember, drek is asking about the
bare minimum of what is acceptable... not what people think would be good or the most fun or balanced or "worth" the extra time it would take to implement.