It actually can be justified pretty easily - a faction has developed onboard strikecraft manufacturing and hangar technology, but initially its too crude, heavy and energy inefficient to be housed on cruiser sized ships, so it requires capital ships. Researching carriers is simply miniaturization of the tech to the level required to deploy it on cruisers effectivelly.

I also agree. Late game all sides are able to entrench themselves to the point the game is undecidable. Because of easy chokepoints. The game would obviously be better and more dynamic if you can jump from every gravity well to every other inside the same system.

I do not like the phase lane system. This is SPACE, not ground. Defensive emplacements should be to protect valuable structures and materials. Jumping should be able to be done to any explored coordinates with probes or scouts. Jumping should use a lot of energy though so a player may not want to jump on top of another player, rather jump some distance away, launch strike craft while the fleet builds up its energy reserves. Smaller ships will not be able to jump large distances due to not having that amount of energy available. Maybe the smaller ships could attach to a capital creating a jump cluster. This could allow for frigates and cruisers to keep their energy reserve.

I'd still like to see an additional race in an expansion, like I suggested above. It wouldn't have to be something like a giant space slug race (which I envision as the cause of the original Vasari exodus) but I think it would make thematic sense. Care to add that to the list?

Only so long as asteroids don't orbit.

But, on a serious note, yeah, I like that idea. Keeps things both limited and free.

The idea of planets orbiting their star would provide a way of eliminating phase lanes. There's an old game call Malkari which is about a planet that was ripped into chunks of rock by 2 stars. You must colonize those chunks of rock. However, they are constantly orbiting their stars at varying speeds.

The strategic element came in to play because one second you could be all alone on the far side of the system and 20 minutes later be in the middle of enemy territory. You had to anticipate where you would be and defend/attack accordingly. It was open so you could go to anywhere in the system. However, your ships had limited amounts of energy so if you tried to go to far or tried to go to an asteroid that was moving faster than your ship could you would run out of energy and be stuck in space.

The game was like a combination of GalCiv2 and Sins, plus the added element of orbiting the stars. You could upgrade tiles for resources and place defensive units on the asteroids. When invading you had to move your units around the surface of the asteroid from tile to tile until you had conquered the entire surface. You could customize the components on ships and research new and better technologies for defense and weapon systems.

The game was 2D, but it was made in 97 so that wasn't a big deal at the time. One bad thing was that there was no logistics system in place. I remember having battles involving thousands of ships. Would make your PC crash if you tried to make too large of a fleet. What really hurt the game was that the developer never bothered to update the game and they shut the multiplayer servers down shortly after it released. Lack of support led to the game being forgotten in time. If you've got a computer that runs Windows 95/98 I recommend you pick the game up off of ebay for cheap and play it, you won't be disappointed(assuming you can get past the vintage graphics).

Combine Sins, GalCiv, and Malkari into 1 game and it would be something truly magnificent.

I've remained silent on this issue for too long, so I think it's time I chimed in:

Realistically, any new expansion will not be a purchased product.  With a compilation (Trinity) already available, this woudl cause consumer confusion and has the potential to hurt future sales of Sins.  Instead, it would likely be a free micro-expansion to bring some attention to the title in the hopes of gathering new sales.  In that respect, it would likely be a very modest expansion with a handful of new features, nothing overreaching.  That being said, I could imagine Stardock using the opportunity to integrate Sins with its Impulse Reactor (presuming that's technically realistic), which desperately needs a flagship title since Elemental tanked.  In that respect, I think the majority of the discussion here would be more geared towards a stand-alone sequel rather than an expansion.

Here's my thought on what content the game could actually use:

A new logistic structure for every faction:

Currently, logistics structures are only interesting near the start of the game.  Logistics planetary upgrades are expensive, so you only get 2-3 per planet, and labs make up a large share of this utilization.  However, once early-game has passed, trade ports become dominant and there is little planning or decision-making left.  The problem is that refineries and culture only stack up to a certain point, so even at maximum utilization, this will still leave dozens of logistics slots open and only one structure to fill them: the trade port.

The game needs a new logistic structure at the higher tech level for each faction to present an alternative to the trade port.  It would need to be something stackable, so it can fill in all that excess logistics space available in the late-game.  It would also have to be something that would drive people to put up civic labs to get it.  Preferably it would be something unique to each faction.  While I do have some ideas, I don't want to bloat this post, so I'll leave it at that.

A new support cruiser for every faction:

The TEC and Advent factions both have underlying problems that are making balance nearly impossible.  In the case of Advent, it's that they have no answer to shield bypass, and for TEC it's the two-fold issue of being unable to shut down enemy firepower like the other factions can (Iconus/Subverter) and being unable to keep capital ships alive in intense late-game firefights.  I believe this issue can only truly be solved by adding new abilities to help these factions counterbalance these weaknesses, and Vasari could also get something new and cool in the deal.

For Advent, what could help is a support cruiser that punishes enemies for dealing hull damage, which would give them a counter-measure for phase missiles that's still applicable in other situations.  For TEC some sort of defensive ship that can block incoming attacks against a single friendly target would finally give TEC the late-game edge they need to match Advent and Vasari.  Alternately, a new ability could be added to the existing underused support cruisers, the Domina and Cielo, while perhaps adding a new ability to one of Vasari's other underused units (since both its support cruisers see plenty of action).  Again, I have some specific ideas I may discuss later, but in the interest of brevity I will move on.

Enhanced Multiplayer Lobby:

Automated map/mod transfer would be soooo nice.  A map preview screen that lets us view the map (if it's not randomly generated) before the game starts would also be great, since the most common complaint with premades is that some people know them while others do not.

Variable AI Personality:

One of the biggest problems with the AI currently is that it's so uniform.  It picks its capital ships more or less randomly, builds its fleets more or less the same way, and all that varies is its spending priorities, which (aside from the comically sad situation of coming across an AI with no fleet and a single planet with a bajillion mines and a super-starbase that you can peg out with a couple Ogrovs...) means very little in the long run.

Instead, the AI should be pursuing specialized fleets, choosing capital ships and unit proportions that create uniquely different fleets, with corresponding behaviors.  Who here would love to face off against a kiting carrier AI?  How about an AI that LRM spams back?  With the correct capital ships in support?  In addition to being a lot more challenging, this woudl give each AI an individual character that's more presistant and less random.

Create a little more machiavellian scheming and alliance-making in unlocked teams to liven things up, and you'd have a much more interesting AI that could add a lot to singleplayer.  This is perhaps a bigger piece of work then what's above, and to be honest I'd be happy if the AI just knew how to handle starbases, but I thought it was worth saying.

[quote who="JustAnotherName" reply="91" id="2824553"
Focus fire has always been a strategy to use in every game. Having a system that gives huge focus fire penalty just implies that the player won't have to micro their units and there won't be any different between a skilled and unskilled player.[/quote]

Exactly. What do you people over here have against focus fire? Prioritizing targets is a legitimate strategy and makes the game better from tactical POV, since you actually have to think about your target selection, not just click on the whole enemy fleet to maximize damage. Why invent completely ad hoc things to limit it and make the game dull?

Remove mitigation and increase hps/shields of capital ships and advent a bit to compensate.

Well they couldn't just get rid of it by only adding to a ship's hull and shield as that would greatly effect repair/recharge rates. Mitigation is a HUGE factor and simply adding 50% more shield and hull would not balance anything.

The point about strikecraft technology perhaps not being small enough to fit on carrier cruisers initially is well observed, though the same logic might not apply to heavy cruisers, for instance.   Also, in the game the strikecraft technology on carrier capitals is far more efficient than that on carrier cruisers, no?  Perhaps carrier capitals should pay antimatter costs for strikecraft until carrier cruisers are researched? 

Focus fire does not take more skill than spread fire, especially with no effective collision damage.  Sins ships have automatic focus fire by target type as their default.  Spreading fire to maximise damage takes far more effort, which is why historical battles usually involved ships firing on targets pre-selected by means of formations before the battle began.

I wouldn't claim that focus fire shouldn't be a strategy to use, just not the only strategy to use, as at present.  The combat system should be completely reworked if there is to be another game.  However, just removing mitigation in an expansion would be impractical, as you say.  The thresholds for mitigation to rise are somewhat low at present though. 

Of Darvin's proposals, my perception is that the late-game economic structure can be altered without new structures simply by following the rebalancing advice from his earlier thread and by making trade ports vulnerable to the destruction of their trade ships.  The support cruiser problem could also be dealt with by improvements to the existing ships as he suggests.  A unified multiplayer lobby with different sub-lobbies and better features is a must.  Better AI might come with the Diplomacy patch, as well as a solution to starbases. 

As a big improvement for the expansion I would advocate a new victory condition, based on possession of all the artifacts in a game.  Then it would have a theme. 

This strikes a balanced between the old version, which couldn't deploy bombers fast enough to ever build up any real numbers, and the current version that has no difficulties maintaining absolutely massive swarms.  This lets you build up quickly, but makes the maximum swarm smaller and harder to sustain.

My understanding is that from a practical standpoint, deploying a patch can actually take a lot of resources even if the patch changes themselves are extremely minor.  As a result, it often doesn't make sense to release micro-patches for non-critical issues.  Still, this is one that should have been addressed a long time ago.