Conquest Mode: A Structured Skirmish Experience.

So I understand the need to forestall a full story, fully cinematic, fully voice acted, 10 hour single player experience.

What I'm suggesting is just a 2d map of stars rated from Easy to Triple Hard, where each skirmish game you succeed, depending on your performance, will result in a permanent income boost (static, linear, or multiplicative) for the rest of the skirmishes.

This allows for a bell-shaped difficulty curve, where you start out doing Easy, Single AI Skirmishes, and build up permanent income until the Medium AI, which you formerly found intimidating, seems like it's in your reach. The difficulty is somewhat dynamic, in that the player decides when they feel ready to move up, although the diminishing number of stars in their current difficulty level urges them upward. Continuing in this mode, you increase either your in-game skill, or conquest-level income boost, until taking on a Hard, Three AI Skirmish seems achievable - regardless of your actual skill level. Past this point, the exponential rewards make all skirmishes easy, but it's like a God mode that you've earned, which is just as fun as cheating and immensely more satisfying. After that, you begin a new skirmish, and see if you can defeat the hard AI in fewer "moves," in a quicker succession of star system skirmishes, primarily using your skill, instead of the income boost, to succeed.

In this way, you could get a 10-hour single player experience, without changing any of the moment-to-moment action. It's a simple progression system that encourages you to try harder AIs and improve your in-game skills, by giving you a boost to overcome the intimidating mental barrier of a harder difficulty level.

There are innumerable ways to expand this type of mode: making units unlockable, so you teach players to use each one before they move on, adding powerful, re-searchable upgrades that takes several skirmishes to complete, and even making the whole thing a persistent co-op mode where you can play together or separately and each player's success affects the other. But the point is not to make it feature rich and expensive, the point is to make single-player fun and shippable.

I know this is decidedly in the realm of post-release or stretchgoal territory. A galactical-scale war game is already ambitious enough for a crowdfunded project. But you don't get what you wish for if you never wish for it, and I'm hoping something like this, which is a simple, but engaging, many hour single player experience, eventually becomes available in the form of a patch, DLC, or even a second Kickstarter.

Thank you for your time.