Dear devs, I am not innocent, I know its resources, time and money, that project fails and that can be dangerous for the company health.
Also, I am not a professional game designer. And maybe as a player my opinion is not widely shared.
But with 3 decades of player experience in all genre, here my humble pitch.
As a strategic player, some would say Grand strategist game, like HOI4, I would find amazing a strategic game about planetary conquest in a cross-over with eve online.
That, the initial invasion force would be an Eve online’ corporation expenditure to give me, the strategist, the initials units for a beach head.
That the eve corporation can deliver me more units to support the defense/invasion.
That, this corporation players, can assist when i call for orbital bombardment, or the opposite, the defending corporation bombing the invader to help defend.
The strategist being a mercenary specially contracted for the invasion/defense, or a Eve corporation’ player acting as strategist. The goal would be to keep/acquire military control of the planet means of production and resources fields for the corporation economical benefit directly in Eve Online.
That said, with their integration of a shooter (soon.tm) they could also do a planetside squad based rts which would also create some more content for the fps bros. I have some old posts about that sort of thing.
I have imagined PI / sov to be a RTS game, in having to build bases, attack other sides structures, turtle etc etc (imagine Supreme Commander), but with hundreds of players, specialising, and having as many types of ground vehicles as we have ships available, and being able to modify those vehicles with the number of modules we have for ships…
This would probably be an entire new game, but could be attached to EVE much like Dust was, in that capsuleers can assist with delivery of materials, orbital bombardments, etc…
if you google way back to when Planetary Interaction was introduced…and then when it was implemented…you will find stuff from devs and Fanfests that will prove what we have right now is the ALpha version of PI…CCP never made it to the beta version