everything has infinite verticle range. So... yes, the verticle component is purely 100% cosmetic

although... I figure if you want to spike your enemy really hard I guess you can pile on a big verticle column of ships so that you can get all of your guns within range immediately

There's times when a planet is DIRECTLY beneath another planet. I really really hate that as it makes it nearly impossible to click on anything in the lower planet's grav well.

as daevangelist said, you can put your caps on a different level to avoid bumping, which can happen a lot to the whale, e.g. I had my whale stuck between the planet and 2 enemy caps, it became a pushing contest.

theres other uses:
-if the enemy is using ships with multiple arcs (caps, flaks, illums) and your fleet is directly above/below them and not on the same plane, in most cases they will turn upwards/downwards to face the ships below/above them and fire only with the frontal arc thus you can reduce the dps output of those ships.
-avoiding turrets.

jinx, wait till you get a wormhole below a planet, it makes it so if you zoom into the planet it gets really dark (as though you lost scouting there, even if you have ships in both wells) forcing me to use a specific angle if I wanted to view the battles.
picture:

theres a certain ammount of automatic variation, but its still more or less on the default plane.

I haven't had this happen yet, how do they work differently?

Frankly, the battles in Sins and HW look pretty similar. Ships still change level and it turns into a furbal when you engage another fleet. The big difference is that ships moved a lot more in HW then in sins, and they didn't get so close.

Your fleets still moved as a group in HW, so if 2 fleets on different levels engaged the ships where tilted up or down, no meaningful difference. It was also annoying to have to check all the different levels but HW was better for the vertical movement as a pure RTS, i think sins is better off without it for the scale.

ha that is sweet. a hidden planet. very sneaky. do you have to phase between them?? if not you could easily defend the neutral mines along with your planet.

"I hid my planet!"

"where???"

"under a crushing pillar of hydrogen gas"

"..."

The fact that ships don't have different armor values on different areas of their hull (like in HW) means that any Z-axis maneuvering is mostly cosmetic. On an unrelated note I do with ships stayed farther away from each other in fights, all the heavy cruisers act like sumo wrestlers and just bumble in there and push stuff around. Not a big deal, but kind of detracts from the epicness.

LOL, I remember in Ascendancy sometimes a planet would be right next to another one and it was really irritating trying to click on the one behind the other. I had to do some fancy camera tricks just to get to it.