Well, poll is auto-locked and stuffs, and I think there's enough interest to start this.
However, my ideas are often specific and don't stack up to a very enjoyable game. Ideas so far:
1)You start with a selection of ship types, each specialized in a specific field. As you gain wealth, you may buy more.
2)Some sort of economy balancing system, you can either harvest tiberium for its mineral wealth or its radiation wealth. Mineral wealth will allow you to clone more drop pod soldiers, add attachments to your ship, create bases on the ground, and so on. While radiation wealth will allow you to essentially mutate(research) upgrades or new types of structures/units. Both carry over, so naturally striking a balance between your army and research is imperative. Sort of think of it like StarCraft's resource system. Very high tech units might require radiation just to create.
3)Alien Newspapers describing the events unfolding, and hacking communications to either lie communicate with alien life of your peaceful intentions, or simply predicting enemy movements. Of course, writing Newspapers is out of my league. Anyone is welcome to take that lore position and create a newspaper whenever you want.
4)Several mutations of tiberium that can be acquired for different stages of planetary domination. Naturally, they mutate in this order ---> Weed:Semi-Plant:Crystal. I'm not positive the Weed was actually tiberium or if it was just a mutated plant, but nevertheless I'll just stick it in there. At the beginning you'll only have semi-plant unlocked, and won't be able to even have weeds until later. Just to clarify, as tiberium spreads it will naturally mutate to the next form until it reaches crystal. Most often you'll just be using weed as a combat weapon, since keeping track of growth of up to three different species could be a pain.
5)All ideas Dwarmin wrote down go here. I'm going to probably just take them all word for word. This means any lore is up in the air. I suck at lore. This is also where creating units comes in using radiation. Naturally, there won't be any "unlockable" mutations, because honestly then you would already have them if you knew about them, right? Perhaps I'll set up some fixed cost upgrades, but that's it. I'll also set the price for the mutation/minerals depending on how powerful/useful I view it.
6)Possibility to return to mothership(which floats just outside the system) for reinforcements, however this will take awhile depending on your vessel and the aliens will have advance by then.
7)Each ship will have a special weapon to use in bombardment or defense. Some ideas:
Battleship: Mounted Distortion Warp Space superweapon thingy. Causes chaos in the selected area and heavily damages all buildings and armies. Would only wipe out a small town/outpost. This will naturally make the population hostile to you.
Support Vessel: Can abduct aliens to gain mutation points. Will naturally make the population hostile to you.
Terraformer: Has an on board field of tiberium, while not worth it to harvest due to how small it is, it will occasionally create a tiberium drop pod(read: Tiberium-filled Asteroid) to use on planets.
Some others too, but I think that's good for now.
8)Finely, some sort of limited supply system, to compound with the mutation/mineral shortage. You'll have to purchase tiberium drop pods by selling your minerals to the mothership(this can be done instantly on already colonized planets due to their Scrin towers, so stocking up after missions is important). Everything else you'll guys have to research and send the plans to a factory on board the mothership if you can't build it on board.
9)I'll try to think of a combat system before I start it, and some example units. Suggestions are welcome for this, as with any of my other ideas.
TL;DR
Orb is swamped with ideas and is wondering which he should ditch and keep. He also has no imagination so he'll need other people to create lore. Orb hasn't thought of a combat system yet, and might need some help with this so that its enjoyable. Orb is likely to start the forum game after going to sleep, if he has the chance.