Edit: I should clarify that does not really effect the main plan, just the development order, though it may lead to a related separate game getting produced.
Fragmented Galaxy has been an extraordinarily poorly focused and organized project. I know this, and it is mostly my fault. Also, I don't really mind. For me it has always been an impulse based project. I felt doing ground combat first would allow us to quickly get a functional game out. Without ground combat, there would be no resources, and thus no economy, ships, or game. Well, I went and made planets for a while instead.
Anyway, the plan for ground combat, which will be the source of all resources and ship production, really hasn't been designed to a point where I feel I can implement it. The designs just seem to gain complexity, and I'm unsure of how big of portion of the game screwing with ground combat stuff should be. Originally the plan was to make is super simple, but the idea of significance between different parts of planets was introduced, and things got messy. On that front the project has basically stalled.
Now, on a different topic: Why do I work on this project? The concept for Fragmented Galaxy (aside from the unrefined ground combat ideas) seems very elegant from my perspective as a programmer. It has a very simple yet powerful and realistic economic system, very powerful political system based on some simple building blocks, a rather different and clever technology/research approach, an truly clever and powerful AI setup integrated with the fleet design which mirrors the ship design system. All of these are built on simple principles that are combine either through a hierarchical structure, networking or both. From the programming perspective Fragmented Galaxy is in some cases a worst case game (massively server side, computational expensive, realtime), but those are issues related to computational load. As far as basic implementation and design, Fragmented Galaxy is just a collection of fundamentally beautiful algorithms. This is why I'm still here, 3 years into the project.
And, as to why the project always gets sidetracked: I'm just here to play with clever algorithms. When I started generating planets, I ventured into the realm of procedural terrain generation, high end rendering, graphics card programming, and now the Python programming language. Any of these areas could happily consume years of my life, and I expect them to do so. As far as Fragmented Galaxy goes though, none of these are really very important to the game.
And that leads me back to a new idea. I'm going to want to get to play with those clever AI, ship and fleet design ideas sometime, and ground combat just isn't seeming very interesting at the moment. Thus, I came up with the idea of making a fleet battle game. Basically you would be given a fixed budget to make a fleet, and battle another fleet made with that budget (or potentially a different budget as a handicap). This could start without fleets, just with single ships, and fleets could be added later. Saving fleet/ship designs (including AI settings) out to files for sharing would allow a single player campaign (which could serve as a tutorial) of preset opponent fleets and corresponding budgets (you could score based on budget used, or losses taken, or both, or simply win/lose). We could allow players to battle their own fleets, battle over the network (Lan) or online, and we could host official tournaments (submit your fleet, battles run server side)
This would be a pure strategy and design game with no realtime aspects. Simply make your fleet (or select one you already made), and press go. Potentially realtime or turn based modes could be added where you could send in backup waves or something like that.
This entire system could be kept intact, but imported into Fragmented Galaxy to allow you to use your same fleets in the MMORTS. The only issue I see is with techs; not all nations in Fragmented Galaxy will have the same techs, and none will have the exact same development status on the techs. It is only an issue with integrating the fleet battling game with FG, and thus I'm not going to worry about it now.
Anyway, I now have an idea that will let me play with the AI, ship and fleet stuff, and make an interesting game that does not have serious hosting issues. It might happen sometime.