I'm also voting against 'cartoony' planets, but not the color palettes, just the Spore-like exaggerations that Precursors_TiLT mentions. Visiting the planet in order to scan it was part of the SC experience, albeit monotonous after a while but this can be mitigated by different technologies to aid/speed up the process that a player may ob
Assuming there will be the same degree of if not more customization of your command ship, how about being able to load out various sizes of ship bays, exchanging module space for fleet capacity? Late in the game in SC2, because it was so OP, I only ever used the command ship in battle and loaded out a fleet of the largest crew capacity ship types as storage for extra crew (extra life) for the command ship. Give players the choice to play with a battleship vs a carrier, or anywhere
One of my fondest memories of SC2 planet exploration was the scanning and the anticipation of discovering anomalies, especially with the excellent music that just made experience so much more compelling and gave you the impression that you visiting a really strange place. I agree that ME sucked in this regard but I feel it tried to streamline this aspect of the gameplay. After perusing the early artists visions of planet types in the first vault I hope the final style is more real
An interesting idea may be multiple ships in combat, rather than just one-on-one. Imagine some sort of team-based AI with group behavior based on the alien mentality: Yehat would engage with wingmen Pkunk would swarm Humans would use formations etc This might convolute the battle a bit but I could see this easily mitigated by gradually introducing the player to more ships in combat has he/she progresses through the game.