Universe design: The rendering at the star, planet and individual ship level (especially for the cruisers and capitols) is beautiful. Mass fleet warfare close up is incredible and I love both the graphical detail and the movement and battle detail, like the pauses in firing, types of projectiles, phase jump halos, etc (probably playing at 1920x1200 with a quadroFX doesnt hurt).
There is just something missing to me about the interaction with the environment for most of the gameplay - maybe the simplicity when you zoom out is critical to make the play smoothly, especially late in the game (I'm running a dual core Xeon 3.2 and have had it slow down once in scaling into a massive fleet battle), but I'm missing out on most of that detail for at least 2/3 if not 4/5 or 5/6 of the gameplay. There are numerous threads about realism vs what looks good in a game, but I favor making the game look good. All the empty space and warp lanes look really schematized to me. I am aware that most of the universe is dark matter, but that isn't to say the distances and relative sizes of world/ship/space currently are realistic anyways.
I guess a related question I had was why warp from planet to planet? Why not set it up such that an entire solar system is in a gravity well. I'm unclear on why you would need to warp/quantum jump/phase hurdle/tunnel hyperspace/whatever from planet to adjacent planet – I know we might be post-relativity in Sins, but just even at a gameplay level it doesn’t make a ton of sense to me. Make the ability to jump something you have to research (like long range jumps work currently) to get from star system to star system.
How about making each star system either one large gravity well or a series of elongated planet-sized ones that overlap?
The first of these options would potentially make things much more open, but the second would still maintain the linked nature of I need to go through b to get from a to c. Linking or enlarging the gravity wells would serve at least a couple of functions - it would make the speed and maneuverability of different units more pronounced and make the tradeoff of fleet power for having to go at the speed of the slowest unit more acute (maybe people could think of strategies to balance slow fleet maneuvers like raids and guerilla attacks from smaller groups of less heavily armed fighters while the fleet is trying to go from one place to another). It would also make the choices of sending what where more important (can’t easily get an enormous fleet from one place to another that quickly). And for that matter, it would be quicker to go from the middle of a to the middle of b by light speed travel rather than by jumping since you wouldn’t have to go in->out->out->in with regards to the gravity well.
