In another thread there was a discussion of abilities, and one of the posters mentioned adding abilities, which led me to think about Guild Wars. Im posting what i posted there and thought i would ask what other people think of the idea?
re:
<<< Traukanshaku's Post>>>
What I'd really like to see is for cap ships to become like starbases, in that there are vastly more upgrades than there are points to spend them on. I realize that this is a hardcoded limitation, though ( I think ), so to answer your question, personally I'd lean towards abilities scaling linearly, or perhaps exponentially on a shallow curve. It would help distinguish high level caps from low level ones, though I'd like to see it be slightly more difficult to level caps past 6 ( I realize that from 1-6 needs to be fairly trivial for long games with the potential for multiple caps ). That way, having much more powerful abilities is payment for the effort it took to level the cap.
<<< And my thought about adding abilities and a gui to load them>>>
Just a thought on what traunkanshaku said above with more abilities than slots available. In Guild Wars, only a handful of hundreds of abilities can be selected for any one "mission", but once done, those can be changed out to any other set of 8 that the player wants.
It would be nice to see hundreds more abilities available, and have the player choose those and slot them into their ships before a game, then start the game and play them. It would add greater variety and difference, and would also mean going in that a player could tailor there playstyle to a economy, damage, or research. It could lead to some very very interesting games.
Certain combinations might not play well against one another, one clearly having an advantage. But some might play more closely making the micro or the decisions of the players the edge in the game.
A simple gui of available abilities and the available slots for the ships could be made and used like the current research screens, only called from just before starting the game. 
I think it would be grand!!!
-Teal