Having played this for a while - and hugely enjoyed it; so pleased this has been funded! - I wondered if my interest might eventually wane once I'd got the hang of it. I think adding challenge modes might enhance replay value. It'd interest me more than just more/less difficult, giving flavours of difficulty.
These could be simple - a stormy planet, more rabid wildlife, persistent raids, scarce resources - or more complex.
More complex ones could be hardcore (disabling saves and autosaving more often, so no strategic saving and re-loading), or social dysfunction (so happiness decays over time), or escape (work through the research tree and build a rocket to get your colonists home).
I'm sure other people here could come up with lots of other ideas too. Effectively you'd make this lots of related games, rather than one game.
For real compulsive behaviour, combine the above with an increasing difficulty scale and make length of time sharable in an online league table for competitive play.
(There's a game called Kingdom of Loathing - http://www.kingdomofloathing.com - that I've played for years because they have this kind of functionality - see http://kol.coldfront.net/thekolwiki/index.php/Challenge_path)
These could be simple - a stormy planet, more rabid wildlife, persistent raids, scarce resources - or more complex.
More complex ones could be hardcore (disabling saves and autosaving more often, so no strategic saving and re-loading), or social dysfunction (so happiness decays over time), or escape (work through the research tree and build a rocket to get your colonists home).
I'm sure other people here could come up with lots of other ideas too. Effectively you'd make this lots of related games, rather than one game.
For real compulsive behaviour, combine the above with an increasing difficulty scale and make length of time sharable in an online league table for competitive play.
(There's a game called Kingdom of Loathing - http://www.kingdomofloathing.com - that I've played for years because they have this kind of functionality - see http://kol.coldfront.net/thekolwiki/index.php/Challenge_path)