Thanks, folks. @11110, I’m not at all offended by your request, and thank you for phrasing it so politely. You should be aware that other authors probably would find it unpleasant and stressful to be repeatedly asked for something they’ve already said no to, however politely the repeat request is worded. Fortunately, I’m a grumpy old man, and fan pressure to do anything I don’t want to do pretty much rolls off me. And I’m grateful that you care enough about the game and the world to take such an interest.
Feel free to present ideas and kick them around on the forum. As upthread, if there’s something that feels gameworld-inconsistent to me, I’ll say so. Past discussions on e.g. blood transfusion and pneumatic tech have been interesting, even if in the end I don’t think those are areas where big advances are going to happen–and this thread’s discussion on explosives has actually changed my thoughts on the world tech.
But I’m not going to make a list of possible innovations now, because the options I eventually write will be ones that grow organically out of the game – potential partial-fixes to problems the protagonist encounters on their way through the world. And it’s worth emphasising that I expect them to be part-fixes, ameliorating problems, not silver bullet solutions that make the problems go away. As we’ve discussed above, the wreckage of a totalitarian empire isn’t promising ground for major technological leaps forward; and the theme of the game is not “technology will deliver us from our dilemmas.”