Is the third dimension anything more than cosmetic?

What do you want it to be able to do? Its space, if your ship can fly upward, the enemy ship can fly upward. You arn't going to find a tree floating around that you can duck behind. You might find an astroid though I guess...

Most people don't even know you can move up and down I don't think, and the only value i've found for it is flying up and over turrents. Turrents can only be built on the default plane, and it seems possible to get up high enough so that they can't shoot you. It is ussually easier to just go around them though.

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

I've actually found that my cap ships tend to slow down or get stuck trying to retreat when they turn on the same plane and run into other cap ships or facilities. They actually just shove the smaller ships aside, but if you're trying to get that cap ship out of harm's way quickly, then changing the plane means that it won't run into anything and slow down on the way out.

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.

Simple Answer: No. Sins is Star Trek Armada in that respect, and has failed in emulating the genius of Homeworld.

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:

"Turrents can only be built on the default plane, and it seems possible to get up high enough so that they can't shoot you."

I don't think that is the case. I've built a number of turrets lined up in a row and they were at different levels on the z plane.

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

Had that happen. Its annoying, but makes for an interesting tactical variation otherwise, because the phase lanes work much differently between the vertically aligned planets.

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

I have had a Planet directly INSIDE a Gas Giant, making it virtally impossible to select the planet inside. (There is a way but it really is tricky and screws with the camera, witch is to zoom inside the planet. (Very difficult to do but is possible) (I'll try and get a screenshot of it.)

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.

Here are the promised Screenshots:


As you can see I have selected a Ice planet but you see a Gas Giant.

Diffrent Angle

This is what you HAVE to do in order to select it and not the Gas Giant.

Obviously it is very annoying problem.

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.

An indestroctable planet!

"I hid my planet!"

"where???"

"under a crushing pillar of hydrogen gas"

"..."

the z-axis is mainly useless because ships don't have a sensor radius. As soon as you have a single ship in a gravity well, you can see the entire thing. Imagine if you could hide ships above the default plane, above the normal sensor radius of other ships. Also imagine if planets actually occluded your view - so you could only see ships that were both in sensor range AND in line of sight of your own ships.

But the gravity wells are really too small to make this kind of strategy feasible.

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.

When you phase-jump a ship vertically, it has to travel to the middle of the x/y axis to jump, and it comes out on the other side on a random point at the edge of the gravity well.

It makes point defenses very difficult, but it also makes attacks completely uncoordinated. Personally, I think its a "we'll fix that soon" feature

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.

I use the Z-axis when stationing Percherons...give them a hold position order and move them up a good bit. Keeps them out of harms way in battles that can range around an entire grav-well. It beats having to spread them around the edges or micro their evasive movements. I also sometimes send LRM groups straight up if an enemy is closing fast and I want another hardier group to draw enemy fire first.