So Im playing sins and enjoying it quite a bit, after some 3 days of playing sporadically heres something of a report.

-Only serious issue: Game crashes. Ive never actually quit Sins, everytime the game has crashed. The crashes arent regular they seem very variable. Sometimes its in the beginning, 10 minutes after starting sometimes its an hour. It doesnt seemed linked to how much stuff is on the screen since its crashed almost right out of the gate in an early game. Oddly sometimes the game will crash 10 minutes after I start, but I wont reboot, I'll just launch it again immediately, and it will play fine for the next 1-2 hours, so this doesnt seem to be related to overheating or anything.

Computer specs: AMD Athlon XP 3000+/ 2 GB of RAM Radeon /X1600 512 MB

-I dont think ships should have to move to the other side of a gravity well to jump for a few reasons: This will greatly increase movement time for fleets, which would be a bit of a pain (that said it would practically force you to split your forces up, making the whole conquer-everything-with-gigantic-roving-superfleet strategy impossible which isnt such a bad thing). Most importantly though I think its a bad idea because the AI is really good at blockade running, ping ponging through highly defended systems and running away when overmatched, and this would make it a lot harder for it to do so. Also since frigates move a lot faster than cap ships, this would greatly strecth out a fleet across multiple jumps, which causes a lot of obvious problems.

-I do think that speed should be variable upon which direction a ship is moving: when a ship moves towards a planet it should be faster than when moving away, and the closer a ship is to a planet the slower it should be when pulling away etc... its sound physics and has some interesting implications (fighters which at least hypothetically realy greatly on speed for defense would be best deployed at the perimeter not to say ships would plot circular paths depending on where they would be going etc....)

-AI seems never to accept a player offer, which is something of a pain. That said it offers plenty of treaties, it will try to backstab you if your busy in a major battle and it will always offer a ceasefire when it the situtation looks grim (aka sieging home planet). Nicely done.

-The pace of research needs to be slowed dooooooown. In a medium game I had all my research that I considered relevant done while I was still a third into conquering my own solar system, which leads it to be a complete non factor for the majority of a the game. Some suggestions: Make each cap ship research-able (you get them all when you research the cap ship construction facility), make cap ship abilities research-able. You could make a set of alien language/communication technologies. Also more frig types and even fighter improvements. Research shouldnt be an early game thing and then nothing IMHO.

-Some of the effects (when a ship levels up it gets a white aura) are kind of cartoony in the sense that it subtracts from the grand visual experience of seeing these space opera battles. If you could make them optional that would be great.

-It would be great if you could customize your flag ships (optionally of course) in the sense of giving them turrets points and you could just which type of turret you want to put in. You could make them researchable, too.

-More frig types too. After you get heavy frigs fleet make up is generally a few flaks/a few scouts (that have survived)/a ton of heavies and cap ships. Making missile frigs or beam frigs would help to diversify fleets and would make frigs more useful.

-A few AI tweek suggestions: AI should focus fire. Ive won a few engagements because the AI spread out its attacks and I concentrated fire ship by ship. When the AI knows you have a superior fleet, it will try intelligently not to engage it BUT if you siege a world it will come running to its aid, making it easier to draw it into a fight. Also when the AI is fighting a defensive war it tends to just throw out scattered reinforcements to beseige worlds when it should try to consolidate its resources and build up a fleet whilst your besieging its outer worlds, or even try to seige your worlds to try to draw you away. Also the AI builds too many seige frigs that arent that useful in engagements and end up handicapping it. Still it plays a very very competent game.

-More defensive deployment options: Gsuss cannons are fine in the beginning but they become overmatched as the game wears on. Adding an anti cap ship battery or something would help. Also gauss cannons should have longer range

-A nice touch would be if ship weapons, particularly the more devasting cap ship weapons, had some kind of kinetic punch. If when a battleship turns its beams onto a frig and the frig gets noticeably knocked back a few hundred meters or even just slowly pushed back that would really "bring home" the impact. Or in another example if when a missile voley hits a ship it got rocked back and forth it would really look like these ships were getting hit. Another thing would be giving ships a bit of inertia so they dont stop on a dime and instead would gently move forwards/backwards, that way battles would have less static ships standing around as fighters swarm by.

-FIgher colisions detection. Fighters very often move straight through asteroids etc...

Thats all I can think of now. Great game am having lots of fun. I dont know how to use fraps or any other type of video capture software but to anyone who does, locking the camera on to a fighter, zooming in as close as possible and then just watching them zoom around as a huge fleet with 8-10 cap ships and dozens of frigs beseige a well defended world is simply an awesome sight. Very glad I preordered. The interface is very well designed (excpet for the scuttle button which is, well hidden) and very easy to manage. I didnt make many economic commentaries because Im still trying to decide what the intentions are. It seems in the beginning of the game money is scarce whilst by the middle its the crystals/iron that become scarce and money is abundant in ridiculous quantities.