You bet your mother there's potential here, Shadow.
(No offense by that)
Calling it a "completely space combat" game is inaccurate. While fighting is probably the easiest thing to do in the game (in a sense), you can also spend countless hours trading commodities to different places. You'll find some profitable trade routes in 1 system, then you'll find much better ones that cross a few systems, and then you leave Liberty Space and start crossing more systems to make money. You can mindlessly fly from one station to the next in one system, which would be relatively safe, but most inter-system trade routes take a certain amount of strategy to plan out. This is probably expanded in multiplayer, where you can get other players to go with you and cover you or whatever.
A lot of people will find simply exploring Freelancer to be its own reward, at least for a while. I myself enjoy just flying through ice clouds for a simple pleasure every once in a while. You also find a lot of bases, NPC trade routes and Jumpholes this way, which always come into use if you return to that area later.
Fighting, trading, exploring, and whatever else are affected by what NPC Factions you're friends with. For example, on my favorite unmodded server, I'm the leader of a clan of (player) pirates, and we're constantly disrupting tradelanes and raiding convoys before we make a run back to base. We can't go near any big bases, so we rely on a hit-and-run stategy.
This is just unmodded Freelancer. A lot of mods improve the AI, which by itself forces players add strategy to the way they play, however they play. Um, I don't feel like explaining other ways mods change the game right now, so I'll just leave it at that.
It hurts.
