This is a short update on what i am working on, just to keep you all in the loop. It is the Empire trait system that lets you customize your empire as you playing the game by leveling up traits that provide modifier for various aspects of the game. 

There are already 16 traits available covering colony management and research and others for combat and space construction are still to come as well as those for the diplomatic and espionage aspect of the game that is going to be a later addition.

Each of these traits has a political affiliation that is then plotted onto a political spectrum graph, where each point of the graph has a positive and a negative modifier per each axis with an emphasis on the most significant. 

The empire's place on the graph determines which governance type's it can choose from. Each governance type modifies the base properties of your empire putting more emphasis on some aspect then on others. 

Your choice matters and you may only change it after some time, and if your empire's political standing changes in the meantime, you will incur backlash from your people until you switch to a new type that better aligns with your empire's current standing.

Fans of the Sword of the Stars series may notice that this has been inspired by the Government system from SotS 2, and i hope you will enjoy my take on it.

P.s.: The work also begun on the various ways of gaining trait points that is going to be listed under the points tab, so more on that will be shared in due time.