So, in Elite: Dangerous (and probably other scifi space games), the player's spaceship can be interdicted by pirates - dragging them out of hyperspace if they fail to escape in time.
This would be a pretty interesting thing to have in Spore. Instead of pirates explicitly raiding your colony, they could raid the player instead.
These pirates could also have their level scale with the distance from the player's empire, but would not be present around Grox systems.
The actual implementation, though, I'm not sure about. Without changing how the space-stage works in interplanetary space, you would need to instead force the player into a fake planet with no visible terrain in order to allow combat to take place.
So, in Elite: Dangerous (and probably other scifi space games), the player's spaceship can be interdicted by pirates - dragging them out of hyperspace if they fail to escape in time.
This would be a pretty interesting thing to have in Spore. Instead of pirates explicitly raiding your colony, they could raid the player instead.
These pirates could also have their level scale with the distance from the player's empire, but would not be present around Grox systems.
The actual implementation, though, I'm not sure about. Without changing how the space-stage works in interplanetary space, you would need to instead force the player into a fake planet with no visible terrain in order to allow combat to take place.