kingteema

Sandbox mode gets rid of all of the rift barriers/story elements. Basically free-build. Set an option for it at galaxy creation. "King of the Hill" mode is the same, except at the center of the galaxy is the "Emperor's throne", where you have to fight and beat the current emperor to lay your claim to it. Then you have to defend it against ever increasing waves of attacks from all other factions in the galaxy for a set number of cycles in order become the new emperor.

This sounds awesome. Much stronger enemies in the center also gets rid of the need for a stupid "rift ring" story hack to keep people from burning through the game too quickly. Perhaps you could also add an option to remove the rift for a true "sandbox" mode. I got rid of it by editing the /lib/passagemap.lua so that "PassageMap:passable" and "PassageMap:insideRing" only returned true.