I would have more realistic maps in terms of planet layout, larger gravity wells, moons, etc.

I'd make ships move a lot more, kinda like fighters, but bigger (ever see those big space battles on DS9?).

I would have turrets and more firing arcs that mattered.

I would add a strategic difference between ships that fire on the move and ships that have to hold still to fire.

I would have variable armor strength depending whether a ship is hit on front or back.

I would have variable AI settings for ships, usually 2 per ship.
Such as:
Fire at max range.
Flank to hit weaker side.

I would add more strike craft options.
Interceptors (long range, hi speed missile fighter).
Strike Fighters (sustained close quarters damage on weaker armor).
Corvette squad (small accurate turrets on slower ship).
Torpedo Bomber squad (the size of corvettes).
And maybe some Gundams here or there.

I would make sensor warfare important. Such as, sensor blocked ships can only be locked on to at close ranges, or you can jam enemy sensors to reduce line of sight in system.

I would make missile warfare more important. Missile interception becomes critical because an errant cruise missile can blow a frigate in half.

Apologies if this sounds fanboi-ish, but I really don't think I would have changed much. Maybe more graphical options such as shadows and a vessel damage model that beats up the skin and mesh as you pound on things, but that's about it.

I'm not saying Sins is perfect. I'm just noting that there's not a lot in it that I would change.

-- Retro

star to star phase link lines with solar gravity wells that contain several planets of interest each so you fly from star to star, not planet to planet. (see stellar conquest)

  i would make tha capital ships MUCH more hard core. I love every part of the game, exept when it takes a Kol several minutes to destory a flak frigate. It should take [I]seconds[I]not minutes for goodness sake   !

And I agree, Yasotay, with everything you have stated in your reply #11. Instead of overloading the thread with a full quote, I recommend that people read that post #11.

1. First, I would increase the X4 elements of the game. I like have each of the victory types are tied together in one way or other. But other then the military victory, the others seem to be some what weak.

Culture is too easy to stop, the Pirates, become non-useable at some point, and the super weapons are in there own little world.

Here what I would of done.

For culture, I would leave it as it is, but add a rebel units that attack the other faction for all factions. I would link this to culture, in which the time to each attack is reduced with each increase in amount of culture you produce. There for there will be more attack against other factions with less culture then you. It is much like the TEC Insurgency but you do not need to be tec, and your culture has more of an effect. Which adds an offensive part to the more defensive culture.

To counter the loss of Insurgency, I would add that under the TEC tree, that the TEC, can sell them some of there own ship, including capital ship. Each time the TEC sell one of there ships, the bounty on there head, is reduced, by 2 times the value of those ships sold. There for keeping the TEC econ. edge, even during late game, were the Pirate force, can be easy to stop.

For the super weapons I would remove the Kostura cannon and the RA, and in it place, put the Rebuild Armada, in which every fleet, gets a bounes just, for being a fleet. This would remove a lot of the problems, that RA, seems to all ways have. I would keep the Advent deliverance engine, as the way it is, but also add, that when it hits a planet, there is a rebel attack at the moment. The fleet of rebel ships, will not attak you for 5 mins, after that, they will attack you too. For the TEC, I would replaced the Novalith Cannon with a the super fighter upgrade.

2. I would make it so that the strike craft problem was fixede in advance, as well as to produce a real diffence between the strike craft of one faction, to that of the other, but make it easy to learn.

Here what I would of done.

Make it so that the closer that a strike craft group is to there carriers, the faster, that they rebuild. There for, you half to risk your carrier, in order to save your strile craft, or risk your strike craft, to save your carrier.

I would change the strike craft in these ways.

For the Vasari
I would of gave them "Phase mines", which attck like fighter, that ram into there targets and explode. The Phase mines can sit in wait like fighter, but can also jump to other systems, but do are destoryed, when they hit there target. On top of that they take twice as long to build, an there for do less damage over time, the long it takes, for them to reach there targets. They do as much damage, as the first run of any fighter group.

For the Advent
For the advent, I would keep them the way that they are, but make them harder to hit, but would add special abilities, like splash damage, and other passive abilities.

For the TEC
I would give them super strong fighters, much like the Vasari are now, but allow for them to reach the numbers of the advent, after there super fighter super weapon comes online.

For more details, just post and I will add more info.

Seige frigates should all have the embargo ability. I mean, it makes sense, right?

Seems like most people are interested in 4x more than rts. They crave more options!

i wolud like to have more options on how to conquer planets like some ground forces that have seperate logistical resources like empire at war.
Also I would like the star systems to be like actual star system (3 colonizeble planets, 4 gas giants, 1 or 2 asteriod belts that actualy loop entirely around the star. Phase lanes that actualy change due to the postition of the planet. Multiple galaxies, one galaxy has 5 stars, the center star the core star is the one to travel to another galaxy.

My pet peeve about most popular science fiction is the obscenely unrealistic depiction of physics. I am firmly of the opinion that people are not inherently imbeciles and that treating them as though they might actually be capable of grasping a little bit of reality is not a recipe for certain failure.

Therefore, if I could have designed the game I wanted to design and play, whatever that entailed (but without going off the deep end by, say, accurately simulating all the physics in the game), I would have had more realistic space warfare.

In the case of Sins, this would mean that the third dimension would not just be cosmetic in nature, but that it would actually be strategically important. It would have, as such, meant relative frames of reference (no flat gravity well disc that defines up and down, left and right no matter how arbitrarily you rotate the camera). It would have meant line of sight, and it would have meant inertia. I'm not going to be too hair-splitting about the invented "physics" like Phase Space and stuff like that, since it enables the game, and I know people really get a kick out of sound behaving like light, but one thing that really wears my molars down is when ships in the game stand toe-to-toe with each other and shoot back and forth until one of them or the other explodes. Something like that doesn't ever happen, EVER, on Earth where mechanics does behave as we instinctively expect it to!

In my game, ships would have realistically have had infinite range for all weapons, and the usage thereof would have been restricted, much more challengingly, by the actual dynamics of the weapons fired - so you don't fire at someone from across a planet's "gravity well" unless you expect that they won't realise they're being shot at quick enough to get out of the way. LASERS and directed energy weapons (except plasma) would have been hitscan beam weapons and would have worked like ship-to-ship sniper rifles, at the cost of chewing through a lot of antimatter during usage. Antimatter would have been a precious commodity stored in large quantities that required conserving and resupplying at planets (and certain ships would have been able to handwavingly absorb energy weapons through shields and things in order to replenish antimatter, as in the game as it stands). Line of sight would have enabled this sort of physics based ship movement and weapon behaviour, by allowing things like stealth, and forcing players to actually think about the deployment of their forces (remember how fun Rome: Total War was? Do you think that was despite, or because of the fact that it made you consider what the heckfire you were doing?) There were a lot of other good suggestions that I won't bother echoing, to save time.

Any of these features being implemented would have, obviously, radically altered the underlying gameplay dynamics, and they would have required a large amount of playtesting to perfect, but I think computer/video gaming needs, seriously, to be shaken out of it's table-top, boardgame mentality where everything possible occurs within an arbitrary range of built-in experiences defined by the particular sets of rules that the game designers thought up.

This is such an underappreciated medium for entertainment and education (YES, EDUCATION! That's what play is supposed to be about, in theory), because it is locked into a mentality that evolved over a period in which any thought of simulating anything interesting on the PC was patently absurd. We no longer live in such a time, and while we can't yet do real engineering calculations on our mobiles, we can start to think of ways to make games mentally challenging AND fun. I'm sick of playing a thousand and one digital variations on Battleship.

That's what would have made Sins truly extraordinary for me, and that's how I would have made it (commercial inertia aside, obviously).