So reading that Sins 2 will have more emphasis on the faction asymmetry, such as the TEC being the only faction with trading mechanics, has got me excited for the potential of seeing each faction play differently on the strategic and empire-building scale.
However, the thing I'd really love to see addressed in Sins 2, and in my opinion a weakness of the original game, is the rather anemic unit asymmetry, i.e. the differences in units and unit composition that each faction has relative to each other. Basically in the original game, all three factions tended to have more or less the same unit types that despite differences in stats and special abilities more or less were direct analogues of each other.
For example, every faction has a weak dedicated scout ship that scouts, every faction has a basic combat frigate, every faction has a long-range frigate to support the combat frigate, every faction has an anti-strike craft frigate, every faction has a carrier cruiser, and so on. To be fair, it's not like the original didn't make efforts to differentiate each unit, typically doing so by giving them different special abilities, e.g. the difference between the Arcova's Probe making it more ideal for scouting, in contrast to the Jikara's ability to capture neutral extractors making it good for early resource harvesting. However when you get down to it, both are still mainly weak scout vessels unsuitable for heavy combat, and many of the ships do feel similar to use between each other: e.g. you use a combination of Cobalts and Javelis' the same way you would use a combination of Disciples and Illuminators, etc.
What I'd love to see is for much more pronounced unit asymmetry between factions, such that each ship will feel completely unique to each faction at first glance instead of feeling like the ships were just copy-pasted and given a new skin. Some of the methods that can be done to accomplish this:
1: Shuffle the roles between different ships.
Basically this entails shuffling the kind of roles each ship is able to do, such that they're able to perform roles that their would-be equivalent to another faction's can't. For example, there can be a faction that doesn't have a dedicated siege ship, and instead have their long-range frigate also act as their siege ship. We can even have weirder combos like a carrier cruiser being the siege ship by sending its bombers in. Even just changing which kind of ships we can make first can make a difference, for example we can have a faction's starting combat vessel be the long-range frigate instead of the light frigate, etc.
2: Make completely unique ship types per faction.
This is somewhat of a corollary to the above, but it'd be nice to further differentiate the factions by having each faction have a ship with a role completely exclusive to them alone. The original Sins already had something like this, where the Vasari have the Sivuskras Ruiner, which is the only pure minelaying ship in the entire game (the Advent's Aeria Drone Ship can also be considered a minelayer, but it's primarily a carrier first and foremost). The TEC and the Advent could stand to have something similar, where they could have a ship that has no direct counterpart to the other two in terms of function.
3: Make the ships more mechanically unique.
The original game already did this for certain ships, like in the case of the above with the Aeria Drone Ship, where while it can perform a minelaying role like the Sivuskras it uses a completely different mechanic to achieve that goal, i.e. creating mines more akin to strike craft and then making them fly by themselves to their destination. What I'd like to see is for similar considerations to be done with many of the other ships, where even if they have the same role they perform it very differently. This can even be done just by changing up game mechanics elsewhere: given that Sins 2 supposedly will have turrets be capable of intercepting missiles now, I can see the Javelis LRM and the Illuminator being different even without changes to either simply because the Illuminator's beams can't be intercepted, which is a very elegant way to make each ship mechanically different.
The Vasari in the original Sins tended to be the faction that was more experimental with ships in the ways outlined above, for example the Jarun Migrator being the main method of building starbases, unlike the other two factions that used dedicated heavy constructor cruisers, or the aforementioned Sivuskras. The hope is that we can see more such unique unit asymmetry especially with the TEC and Advent, since many of the concepts mentioned here have already been tested in Sins of a Solar Empire, and thus could be expanded upon in this game. Not only would it make playing each faction feel even more different and fresh, but it could give the opportunity to further emphasize a particular faction's traits simply due to the types of ships they have or do not have.
