Some suggestions (basically stealing cool ideas from other games) :
- Travelling from system to system is really slow, but IMO it is also a good thing. The problem with this is that once you want to conquer another system, you need a foothold. There should be the possibility to build a Mothership (think HW2) with ship-building capacities (maybe only frigates/cruisers). Maybe limited to 1/player to prevent abuses (or using a huge amount of fleet cap (60-100 ?)
- When travelling from system to system, the ships arrive near the sun. This is not logical as they should at first go through the outer asteroids and planets. the links between stars should go from outer asteroids to outer asteroids. It would enable the possibility to build some defenses to deal with extra system invaders.
- I think this game has a "supreme commander" feeling (zoom feature, scale, size of the game map), but it lacks the T4 (experimentals). Hugely devastating weapons, immensely powerful humongous ships, that kind of things.
- planets/asteroids "militia" : frigates or cruiser ships that are good at defense and should stay near a planet or asteroid to defend it (I like this better than the static defenses). Maybe not taking fleet caps, but then, no capacity for travelling. The IA is using static defenses in a bad way IMO. It is too easy to circumvent or just go through to attack the planet. With defense ships, it helps resolving this problem.