Personally I disagree with more ship classes per function.  While I do believe some overlap in function is good, I do not think we should have multiple ships specialized in the same function.  My experience is that usually this results in one going unused completely in favour of the other, and can really reduce your choice as to whether to tech or not to tech.

I'd like to see more focus put on the civic technology side.  We need more interesting pieces of tech like the phase stabilizer that actually let you do something interesting with those civic labs rather than just bolster your economy.  Perhaps an entirely different economic outlook could be employed to add more flavour and variety to the currently monotonous colony system where each planet is largely the same.

Beyond that, I'd want Sins-2 to be its own game and not be defined by its predecessor.

That'd be a nice improvement.  Maybe clear up some of the hopelessly outdated stickies.

... there's an ongoing joke on one of the oldest forums I'm still active on:

"Darvin can't go anywhere for 5 minutes without being promoted to moderator"

Not exactly true, but in my time I've been heavily active on maybe a total of 12 forums... and of those I've been a moderator on six at one point or another.  That's pretty insane when you think about it...

Yet Another Sins 2 Thread.

I'd like to see:

• Don't screw up the basic chemistry of the game!  Don't try to improve a winning formula and chemistry so much that you destroy it.
• Allow for auto-download of Galaxy Forge made maps and mods.
• Allow options for up to 10 v 10 if that's what people want.
• Allow players to adjust the settings so that they can play the game online without any lag.  Allow players to reduce superfluous, unneeded features to a minimum.  (Does anyone who plays PvP really care how nice an individual ship looks when they spend 100% of their time zoomed out to where they would never see those details?)
• Release the game in a polished state--eliminate minidumps and desyncs.
• Create an improved ICO with far less lag and disconnects.
• Come up with some sort of a system that invites single player types to come online and play against other single player types.  "Ironclad Online invites you to join a 5v5 with other new online players."
• The game has to include some sort of a campaign that would serve as a tutorial.  Perhaps at the successful completion of the campaign players would be invited to go online or perhaps some of the campaigns could require being on the winning team in an online PvP game consisting of new players playing through the campaign.
• Built-in voice comm with the ability to easily mute other players or turn all voice comm off.
• An improved chat room system.

IMHO all future Stardock/IC games should come with a 64-bit build. We have seen over and over and over that 4X strategy games have a sprawling nature to their data set that is very difficult to contain within the virtual address space of a 32-bit process, at least as far as Stardock's implementations have shown. Couple that with some kind of high performance on-disk database for caching less often used objects/data, and you should form the technical foundation for the future of Stardock/Ironclad 4X strategy games. These two measures would in principle get rid of the minidumps due to out of memory once and for all.

Technical issues aside, I'd like to see a more immersive customizability and personality to the units you create and the planets. GalCiv 2 would let you see the planet closer up, and throw out quotes from a database representing how the citizens feel about living there. That was pretty cool, but that represents just one step towards the kind of character-building that I'd like to see.

Next, I'd like to see a veterancy system for ordinary ships and starbases, so that they can improve their stats somewhat as they have more battle experience. They won't be able to get new abilities or improve their stats as markedly as a capital ship, but there would be value in retaining your ships rather than throwing them to their deaths. This would have to be balanced so that a player without veteran ships would still have a fighting chance (given proper strategy) to take out the guy who has been training up a fleet of veteran ships all game.

For planets, there should be one-off morale boosts for certain events, that only last a limited time. Morale would slightly improve the rate of construction, population growth and commerce. You would notice a morale boost if a planet gets sieged but survives due to a hard-won battle in orbit with your defending forces or fleets. You might also get a morale boost in a friendly system where your flagship (the oldest capital ship currently in service) is currently stationed.

I also like the idea of evolving technology, hinted at by someone in an earlier post. Keep the tech tree conceptually as-is, but also factor in that ships naturally and irreparably deteriorate over the span of years. For example, it is only possible to retrofit a ship so far, because design decisions like the shape of the hull and the space in the interior of the ship will eventually reach hard limits, and changing these limits would be too expensive or impossible without compromising structural integrity.

This concept of evolving technology would manifest as a gradual decrease in effectiveness of long-serving capships, eventually necessitating the decommissioning of a ship. When a ship is decommissioned, its service record is evaluated, coming up with a numerical "score" that represents the ratio of engagements attempted versus engagements "won" (where enemy losses exceeded friendly). The higher the score, the more of the crew of the ship will be re-commissioned into a new ship, which will be stronger, more current and more powerful than the old ship. This will manifest itself in things like flight speed, weapon damage, hull points, and the effectiveness of activated abilities.

So if your flagship reaches a very high level and has only rarely had to retreat from a losing battle, while on the flip side it conquered many planets, it would be decommissioned retaining, say, 90% of the experience points of the original ship. A new ship of the same class would be created with stats even greater than the starting values of the original flagship, and it would keep 90% of the experience.

Decommissioning wouldn't become mandatory at any given time; you could in principle leave an ancient ship in service forever. But after a certain point, additional credits would start to be deducted to keep the ship in service, presumably because obsolete parts have to be special-ordered, and crews trained on new ships have to be trained also on the ancient ship. The effectiveness debuff would cap out around 75%; e.g., an initial hull integrity of 1000 would stop deteriorating at 250. But you can't just decommission a brand new ship, either; decommissioning wouldn't be possible at all until, say, 20% of the initial stats have been lost due to ship age. It's up to the player to decide whether to keep an old ship in service, or to turn it around (at a significant strategic risk due to its unavailability) as soon as decommissioning is possible. Maybe also throw in a researchable tech to improve the benefits granted to replacement ships when you decommission.

The upshot of the decommissioning process is that, near the end of a very long game, capital ships would be extremely powerful. Having gone through 6 or 7 generations of improvements, your highly experienced crew could come out of the factory with a new ship at level 7 (out of 10) but with 3 times the firepower and hull points as the original design at the same experience level. This rewards careful strategists who make sure that their capital ships survive engagements, and provides the maximum reward to those who make sure that they actually win every engagement involving their cap ships. Eventually, this effect becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, helping to wind down painfully long games by providing the more skilled strategist with a fast, powerful behemoth of a capital ship that can roll in with a small escort fleet and conquer the enemy, regardless of the amount of resistance. But to get to that level, we're talking hours and hours and hours of play, accumulating momentum and field experience.

Aside from modelling the real life facts of design obsolescence, this system would also model the real life concept of operational knowledge, which is basically a whole set of competencies and rules that ship crewmen (in the modern Navy) accumulate over the course of their career. When the chain of command is unbroken, and senior officers are allowed to personally train green officers in the ways of the ship, the operational knowledge is preserved from generation to generation, even across new ships. If the ship is lost in combat, all that operational knowledge is lost. And we can assume that ships that do very poorly in combat won't have much valuable operational knowledge to share anyway, hence there would be a significant (50-60%) exp loss by decommissioning a ship that loses most of its engagements.

Just thought of something else: Maybe you can have the decommissioning process only apply for TEC, to add some flavor. For the Vasari, ships don't deteriorate, but you can invest materials / credits to unlock experience levels above 10, forming a sort of "super-elite" crew that can crank the ship stats into overdrive. Same result, immensely powerful capships, but without deterioration over time, instead bringing in a resource cost. Not sure what other unique system you could introduce for the Advent, but I'm sure someone could think of one.

One balance idea would be to control the number and types of resource meteors in maps (or at least map creators) so that the game is more balanced, since the difference between winning early game could be a crystal and metal meteor.

Phase lane system is fine. It's be really annoying to have defenders always one jump away but also have every area vulnerable. Lot of structures suddenly become very weak or useless.

Exactly the opposite IMHO. Building of starbases and static defenses would become even more important, since you would have to secure your every important planet in a system with enemy presence, not just one chokepoint. Also more complex fleets deployment strategies and fleet splitting would be encouraged, instead of simply having one giant fleet from all the fleet supply and starbase stationed at the chokepoint gravity well, thus often creating late-game stalls because of impenetrable defenses at one location.

Also, phase lanes would be there - but intersystem ones. So you would have to create maps more realistically - 15 stars with 6-10 gravity wells each, instead of one system with 80 gravity wells and 10 earthlike planets like it very often is now. See my FreeSpace map for better idea how map with "very open" intrasystem phase lanes and intersystem phaselane chokepoints would play. Its essentially like Sins, but on a bigger scale (whole systems playing the role of current gravity wells, gravity wells adding additional layer of strategy into them - this additional layer is not possible with current Sins).

If I want to go from planet a to planet b I should be able to without going through c, d and e. 

Of coarse the game would need new abilities and defenses but if I built a super weapon on planet X with fortifications and you sent a fleet big enough to overcome this it would leave your space open to attack. My super weapon would not fire a straight line to your planet, it would launch, change coarse a few times so you did not know where it came from. 

I don't agree with a choke point asteroid, this is space and I should easily be able to bypass over, under or around (3D) to get to your home world. A true orbiting universe I would love with no phase lanes but you dont want to just warp into space without probing for junk that will kill you so you build the lanes by exploring and setting wav points that are safe for warp speed. You can also give these routes to new allies if you wish. If an enemy probe finds your planet you know they have a fast route now and better set up to defend but until then there is no way for the enemy to even see your planet until it has been probed or scouted.

As of now this is just a ground map with no ground.

Removing phase lanes from the game could completely destroy it since the game play would be very different.  The phase lane, travel distances, and the choke points they create are integral to the strategy of the game.

An updated Galaxy Forge with "copy/paste" and an "undo" function would be nice.  However, it would still be kind of useless for people who play online multiplayer PvP since the maps won't auto-download.

They tried that in the early beta versions. According to IC, it wasn't fun. I'm inclined to agree that in practice it wouldn't be as fun as it sounds in theory.

i like phase lanes but would like it to be more 3d in its approach to map creation rather than the current 2d flat map.

a limit to the number of planets per star would also be good