Can you change the prices from time to time on the different bases. It might make it a bit more interesting if the trade routes were not always exactly the same. If people keep feeding Consumer Goods to Leeds or Beryllium to Los Angeles, eventually those places will not need those goods or may not need to pay such a high price since demand is not as high. Maybe have 4 or 5 sets of prices and swap them out occasionally for one another every few days if it's possible or just some easily edited text file.

Also, changing location of goods or ships, or making ships/goods more difficult to come by. What if the only way you could obtain high high end ships was to fight for them or complete a series of missions for one. Why not bases too, or not so much bases, but those battleships. Those Battleships could move from location to location based on story elements in your server or perhaps just because they were ordered to patrol a new section of space.

Running storylines? Anyones world have these? Anyone tried to play with this? Can you create missions and next articles for people to read when at the pub or pick up from the mission selections?