Role of planets and other celestial bodies in hand

[PokerChen]

In Classic, the planet system you warp to essentially have no in-game function, whether it is a gas giant, moon, asteroid belt, neutron star, etc. They are simply pretty backdrops on which battles take place.

Would you change this in the sequel? Planetary  bonus? Or simply a graphical hint, e.g. asteroid belt have lots of deposits, while gas giants can support a lot of orbital facilities?
How would you consider a Sins of a Solar Empire approach where planets are the primary sources of a class of income?

[Misery]

On one hand I kinda like the idea of different planets DOING something, on the other hand though there's already so very, very many structures and such that makes dealing with each planet different, particularly when attacking.  A lot of info for the player to take in.

If there's a way to do this sort of thing that doesn't involve more confusion for the player though, it could be interesting.  Though I dunno if having specific building types linked to specific planets would work too well.   One thing that's nice about the current game is that anything can go anywhere, there's no arbitrary restrictions on that (most of the time), aside from those metal generating thingies requiring metal deposits. 

[Pumpkin]

I already had ideas about that, but I feel they would rather fit into "ideas for maybe latter". My approach for not overwhelming the player with information would be to have "exceptional" planets.

For instance, I wanted to rework the Dyson Sphere: the planet in the background would be the image of the Dyson Sphere itself, and the thing spawning the gatlings would be an "Orbital Dyson Factory". I also had ideas for a new Minor Faction: an Eons-Old Zenith, so old that it reached the size of a planet and is displayed in the background (I'm still not sure of the gameplay but it would involve something similar to the Dyson Sphere: finding it and interacting with it).

[Draco18s]

Ditto black holes?

Space Empires 4 made black hole systems actually meaningful (and purdy).  Ships would get pulled towards the center a little bit each turn (2 spaces, a system was about 25x25 in size, so any ship with >2 movement could always make it out--undamaged, slowest ship you could build had 4).  If they reached the center, OM NOM NOM NOM.

[Orelius]

I already had ideas about that, but I feel they would rather fit into "ideas for maybe latter". My approach for not overwhelming the player with information would be to have "exceptional" planets.

For instance, I wanted to rework the Dyson Sphere: the planet in the background would be the image of the Dyson Sphere itself, and the thing spawning the gatlings would be an "Orbital Dyson Factory". I also had ideas for a new Minor Faction: an Eons-Old Zenith, so old that it reached the size of a planet and is displayed in the background (I'm still not sure of the gameplay but it would involve something similar to the Dyson Sphere: finding it and interacting with it).

Yeah, I always found it strange how the dyson sphere supposedly surrounded a whole star tet was smaller than a planet.  AI war has lots of size scaling that doesn't seem to make much sense.

[Nuc_Temeron]

I think this should be related to the Astro Train network as described in another thread. A planet has certain materials in abundance, and that helps determine what cargo the trains carry and the consequences for destroying the train car carrying it.