You've been tasked with making an ss13 tycoon game

[Jacough]

How would you design it?
Me? I'd have it be part sim city manager and part dwarf fortress. You'd start with a basic city weighed you're tasked with expanding by adding on additional departments, allocating resources, and managing the station's budget. You'd also bee able to hire new crew members with different strengths, weaknesses, and needs. You'd have to keep them happy though by making sure their needs are filled our they might just go postal and start murdering their co-workers.

There'd be a papers, please element to it as well in that you'd have to do background checks on new employees unless you want to risk syndicate scum sneaking onto the station. If your detectives can't track them down fast enough bad things start to happen. Crew members start turning up dead. Money and resources start disappearing, bombs start going off, singularities start getting released, and eldritch abominations start popping up.

[callanrockslol]

Max out sec, keep an officer for every other person to ensure they don't try anything. Never lose because you can't outtide the tide.

[Uristqwerty]

Dwarf Fortress, IN SPAAAAAAACE!! urge to make the preceding into TVTropes links...

I'd imagine a resource management game, using semi-autonomous characters similar to DF. Assign jobs based on character ability scores, designate department work areas (and optionally assign specific characters to them).

There should usually be tension from slowly depleting resources, but the player can make a finite number of emergency requests (for supplies, manpower, temporary military, etc.), the game ending when (not if!) they have no more emergency requests left, and cannot handle the current disaster using purely on-station resources.

For more interesting variety, the player can only directly give orders to human crew (+ non-human biological crew?), orders to the station AI and bots have to be relayed by the appropriate crew, making some more valuable than others.

To provide challenge, an algorithm sends increasingly-powerful antags and increasingly-dangerous events. For late-game threats, it might include mixed teams of antag types and/or give antags abilities they normally wouldn't have (cult-wizard-aliens!)

A variety of multiplayer modes would be possible, including co-operative control of a single station, co-operative/competitive interaction between different stations, and a more asymmetric mode where one or more players control the antags against one or more players controlling the station(s) (could be both restricted-power PvP and unlimited-power PCvGM antag setups) (an 8-station diplomacy game with GM-antags, last station to fall wins?).