Ok, here are a couple of ideas:
It would be interesting to be able to somehow tag grav wells as "impassable" by auto-generated paths. For instance, when I want a frigate factory to resupply one of my fleets a couple of jumps away, I set the rally point of that factory wherever I want my new ships to be delivered. However, the auto-generated path that my new ships will follow to reach my fleet sometimes happens to cross a pirate-owned sector, crawling with baddies. Depending on the type of the vessel crossing their system and the size of the pirate fleet, consecuences for that range from none to the destruction of my ship.
Another example of that is when I try to relocate one of my big fleets form one planet to another, and the auto-generated path crosses a pirate sector. Of course I can avoid that particular path by setting waypoints for my fleet with the shift key, but sometimes I just forget to.
Someone above asked for a way to reorganize the queued research tree, which would be great. Same is true with frigate factories, because right now there is no way to actually know which ship is coming off the line next.
The interdictor cruiser someone asked for is another brilliant idea in my opinion. This would be my approach to the concept:
· The intedictor cruiser would be a new type of capital ship, less proficient in combat but with a high-level ability that enables it to completely disable the phase drive of any ship in the gravity well. This ability would require the ship AM reserves to be fully charged to be activated, and when powered up would gradually consume the AM reserves over time, eventually depleting them.
· In the lower levels, the interdicion field would only "jam" the phase drives of other ships, instead of completely disbling them, jump-inhibitor style. Then the high-level ability would enable a high-level interdictor to completely disable any phase drive in the well, until destroyed or its AM reserve depleted.
· Abilities for this capital would then be:
1. Inhibit jump: Ships in the gravity well get their jump drives jammed and take longer to jump, longer with each level. When turned on, this ability would consume the AM of the ship over time.
2. Reduced AM cost for inhibitor: Less cost per second each level.
3. Ignore Interdiction field: Cast upon a friendly ship, this ability would allow its target to ignore any interdiction field present in the system. Level 1 could only target a small group of friendly frigates, level 2 a bit more frigates and level 3 yet a larger group or a single capship.
Special ability: Turn the inhibition field into a complete phase interdiction field. No phase jumps would be possible from a gravity well where this field is active. Would require a high ship level and all 3 levels of no.1 ability.This ability could have a short power-up period after the ship emerges from phase, so when you are defending a planet and you see an exceedingly powerful fleet arriving at your planet, a short run-for-your-lives situation would take place as all ships try to flee the gravity well before the interdiction field becomes active.
Since there are three different races with different capital ships and different abilities, this could be the approach to the massively fleeing fleets problemof one of them. The other two races would need a different approach based on capital ships to differentiate them, of course.
All of that said, I have to say that I am really loving the game as it is. And I do appreciate a lot the opportunity the community is given to help improving it.
Oh, anf finally, I do not think that we need a faster pacing at all, I love it as it is, specially taking into account that the pace is very configurable. It allows for a little time to think.