I think that in arguing for or against space lanes, you have to look at what other games have done. Comparing SOASE to past games it's evident that it isn't necessarily an original idea, but you can definitely see the potential for it to either work or fail.
Cases against random hyperspace:
Rebellion: The game had it's pluses...and it's negatives. Fleets would pop up in a system, destroy everything on the planet, and then disappear to another system before you could respond. Ships were going willy nilly everywhere. You had a warning that an enemy fleet was in bound. Sometimes it would say 1 Star Destroyer was heading towards your planet, you have your small force waiting, and bam, twenty Star Destroyers show up. Or none. It was all really random. You also had anywhere bewteen 150-250 planets to work with, and of those 150-250 usually half of them were useless since they were on the outer rim of the galaxy, uninhabited and a pain to make useful. In on game a launched a massive attack on the Empire's main planet, Coruscant.
I sent my two largest fleets, huge massive fleets with tons of ships, fighters, troop transports. They were the fleets I had hopping around protecting my two main planetary systems. Problem was, one left from one planet, and the other left from a different planet. Due to speed and distance yada yada, the two fleets arrived at seperate times, one of them was annihilated, but took out a chunk of the enemy, and the other one arrived ONE day later, and finished off the rest of the empire. I was ticked, especially since there was no way to order the ships to pause/retreat/wait.
Reach for the Stars: Blah, another appalling game. Once again, you build ships from your homeworld and they hyperspace to other planets to colonize them. The same trouble popped up. When your ships entered hyerspace they were locked into place, and you couldn't stop them to turn around, so while you would send your ships on a long journey and your homeworld came under attack there was no way to turn them around. Enemy fleets appeared quicker then you could dispatch ships to attack them. It had tons of other flaws, but the hyperspace was a real pain.
Cases for locked hyperspace:
Hegemonia:
A great game, with some flaws. You started on one planet, in a solar system with five or more other planets all orbiting a sun. I don't remember if it was a full orbit, it might have just been a pseudo orbit, with the planets kind of moving slowly. The planets varied from ice, to Mars like and Earth like, as well as moons orbiting the planets. There would be a wormhole somewhere on the map that would lead to another map like the one you started on, with planets and asteroid fields and other things you could colonize or exploit. Planets could be terraformed, admirals and captains could be assigned to ships, cloakable spies could be sent out, tons of fun little things like that. The games greatest downfall in my opinion, was that the controls were kind of confusing and you were limited in how many ships you could build. Usually the end of the game consisted of you having build six, that's right, just SIX of the largest space ships available to you and sending them against the AI's six largest ships. Which, were each equally matched in weapons fire. You couldn't capture planets with transports either, so if you attacked a planet you nuked it from orbit and then sent a ship to colonize it, which usually resulted in games where nuking/colonizing just went back and forth. In the end the game was always a stalemate, with your planets producing ships just as quickly as the enemy and a stalemate would ensue.
Conquest:Frontier Wars:
In my opinion, this game was a classic. It was like Starcraft, in space. You start on just one planet placing buildings around the planet forming a loop. You collected three resources and built ships to spread out and build your infrastructure on more planets. Each map had planets, nebulaes, asteroids etc for you to harvest. There would be one wormhole which connected you to another map, which had planets and resources etc for you to gather. All of your ships required supplies, if one of your ships ran out of supplies you couldn't use special powers on the ships or even fire you weapons, so you had to have constant supply routes established. In order to establish a supply route, you built a gate around a wormhole, providing resources to the next system connected via wormholes. The gates also locked the wormhole, preventing enemy ships from entering a system until they destroyed the gate on the other side. Also, traveling through a wormhole was near instantaneous. Games played out like Island hopping in WW2. Epic naval battles set in space.
My opinion:
I think there is a case for and against the space lanes traveling routes. I think that the game would most benefit from adopting methods used in previous games. A free for all hop anywhere on the map game would drive me nuts, having to constantly defend/build defenses in all of my solar systems would drive me nuts. By limiting traveling you can create choke holds to make sure large enemy forces don't get to your secure strong holds.
If systems were composed of a star with some planets around it, not necessarily orbiting but just scattered around the star, and there was just 1 wormhole entering the system. Each planet could have a gravity well around it. Buildings could only be built
within the gravity well. Defenses would have to be close to the planet, the only thing that could destroy an escaping fleet would be another space fleet. Imagine this, your fleet is sitting there at one of your planets being repaired by your ship docks. An enemy fleet enters the system at a wormhole in the center of the system. The ships are traveling at normal speed. The enemy flies towards one of your planets, gravity accelerating them towards your defenses. Your fleet gets to your planet, the enemy fleet attempts to leave and the gravity well slows them down. Kind of like how when going from one star to another, when you first leave a system your ships travel painfully slow, but then eventually they pick up speed, then slow down again upon reaching the next star. So all of these solar systems would be connected via worm holes, fleets could sit around the wormholes defending them. Enemy weaponry could be fired through the wormholes, probes could enter the wormhole or scouts to check out the enemy locations. Yada yada etc etc. It's a thought, perhaps there is a chance it could be implemented. Or considered.
