The problem isn't just going to pirate bases, it's going through them that's the problem.  Pirate bases usually are placed near the center of the map, and as a result are often short-cuts across it.  This is actually a nice feature from a tactical perspective, but means that if you blindly order your units from point A to point B, there is actually a very high probability they will path through the pirate base.

So, just making scouts avoid the pirate base as a destination is insufficient, the path-finding behavior needs to be rewritten so they avoid the pirate base when moving from point A to point B.

Could something be done about ship movement?  Specifically, the insane giant u-turns ships make to turn around while moving?  It make often make retreating suicidal as your ships go deeper in for a good 30 seconds before turning around.

I would also like to see pacts and envoys rebalanced and made more useful.  As it is, it's something to do when you're already winning for some extra bonuses; it's not something anybody would ever concentrate on as a strategy.

Oh, and one big one: a map preview function!  It would be nice to see what those non-random maps looked like before playing.

I get severe lag with ICO as well, much worse than it has been previously.

I've already made comments on diplomatic relations and the Diplomatic Victory!

Other issues:

Mines- as you're aware of from the mines suggestions thread.

Capital ships- there have many threads on how to improve the situation away from carriers-only.  Either making carrier capitals as slow as colony capitals or battleships faster would be a basic improvement. 

Fighters- currently players tend to build bombers only as fighters are considered ineffective.  I've long suggested that it is far more usual for flak to counter bombers.  The AM costs for strikecraft could use a rework, they are far too expensive for hangars and non-existent for carrier capitals.  Perhaps carrier capitals could pay 50% and hangars and starbases 33%?

The effect of the Deliverence Engine on culture seems minimal, and I've often questioned the mechanic where culture is split among phase lanes as it seems counter-intuitive.  A planet with many phase lanes should be an excellent site for culture, yet this mechanic is contrary to that.

I'm not sure what impact trade and refinery ships even have on the game any more, but there are still techs for them.  The mechanic in theory is that they can be destroyed for bounty and to cut the income of trade ports and refineries.  The issues with them are that I'm not sure that this mechanic still functions; that the ships move too fast; and that they rebuild far too fast, far faster than constructor vessels. 

Insurgency is a very poor tech in 1.2- the pirate missions have made it very redundant and it is in need of a major overhaul.  Specific techs that could also use work:  Martyrdom, Mobile Phase Detection/Degradation, Returning Armada, Ruthlessness, Colony Pods, Resource Focus, Refineries, Vasari Volcanic Population upgrades.

Techs I used to have as in need of work were Planetary Shields which have been boosted in 1.2 by the Novalith rework; Pinpoint Bombardment which was reworked and it is early to judge it; and Communal Labour.  

The weapons tech tree has also been a constant subject of mechanic threads, with the worst offender being the Vasari tree because of the positioning of phase missile tech and the low utility of other weapons research. 

That's a quick summary, is that what you wanted?

The whole fighter/bomber/flak triangle thing is something that has popped up enough to warrant examination, IMO.  As it stands now, it seems to me that fighters are just too fragile against flak.  Sure, specific cap ship abilities like Vertigo can work to counteract this... But as a whole, I think dropping flak accuracy against fighters by a bit would go a long way to balancing the three out.  It would make sense conceptually too, that the faster and smaller fighters would get hit less, as they spend less time in the area of effect and are much harder to track.

The only buff I could see a Deliverance Engine getting over what it already has would be to disable enemy culture buildings at the site of impact.  Remember that it already grants +25%(!) damage to your ships at the site of impact, and can also be used defensively or as a friendly boost in team games.  It has more flexibility than just culture flipping.

I doubt the trade and refinery systems will be tweaked much.  You can easily test to see if they still grant 50 credits when destroyed(or some new value).  If econ frigates were as slow to rebuild as constructor frigates I think a number of players would not even bother with them at all, aside from a basic 3-4 chain of train ports.  Trade would need 45 minutes to pay for themselves if interrupted and subject to those respawn times, and refineries close to two hours to break even. 

Insurgency is one of those techs designed for large FFA games.  Remember that pirate missions are one per five minutes.  If someone else spams out a tiny 3,000 credit raiding party, you're SOL on all other locations.  But if you're doing a multi-star FFA, you might see 100's of points of fleet supply popping up every few minutes.  The current values are set as something like 20 base fleet supply for the first tier and 40 base fleet supply for the second.  So if you research the tech, you either get both levels or not even bother with it.  If the bases were set to 30 and 60, it might be a bit too much.  E.g. if they warp to 10 planets you'd have 600(!) fleet supply attacking the enemy at no cost to you. 

The only problem with weapon tech is that they have to balance it out with fleet scaling.  If you have 100 LRMs, and techs were reworked to boost by 10% each point, you'd suddenly have an extra 60 LRMs-worth of firepower with the missile research.  About the only change I can see here is discounts for techs that affect few ships.  For example, the beam tech for the TEC, which affects all of the Kol and starbases with +1 weapons.  The Vasari pulse beams for their capital ships is another.  At max it will affect one of three damage types on no more than 16 ships. Trade port research for starbases was discounted in Diplomacy, so it would work for those upgrades as well.  Weapon tech is meant to supplment your firepower when you reach capacity, not provide an instant juice boost.

Planetary shields need a role other than providing a Novalith defense mechanism.

Planetary Shields is Tier 5.

Two other minor long-standing complaints:

-Has the Dunov icon been fixed yet, so that it no longer flies backwards?  I had the impression that Ironclad cherish this bug and had vowed never to fix it.

-To the utter disbelief of many, the flashy new box art Trinity portraits were not included in the game.  Can we have them please?

Also, can we unify the multiplayer lobbies and replace the useless sub-lobbies for factions with sub-lobbies for game versions?  So instead of Advent Alley we have Entrenchmentville, which might prove more useful?    

-Make it so that when we right click with ALT pressed on an ennemy ship , the ships we are commanding get an attack order on all the ennemy ships of its type in the gravity well : pretty easy to code i think. Actually, i have to keep MAJ pressed and click on every frigates of the same kind in the -jumping !- empire tree. Quite a pain.

-fix the advent carriers full of homing mines. When you see an advent AI fleet with ten carriers full of homing mines slaughtered whereas, if it had been fighters or bombers, they would have crushed their foe, it is so disappointing to watch.

-Like darvin3 said, fix the AI suicide attacking starbase behavior. Only the TEC are a threat to my starbases because of their rocket launcher cruiser. I utterly crushed any other fleets thanks to meteor strike. And when i attack, only orkulus are actually challenging. For advent and vasari starbases, go bombers and the time you bomb the planet with you capital ships, the starbase is destroyed... they are lots of topics about this issue if you want to learn more about it.

-Make the advent anti-building frigates useful. Actually, they are far less efficient than bombers for building clearing (i mean, who has ever met 10 or 15 AI turrets in a tight formation supported by repair bay, the kind of situation that ship is meant to counter, in his games ?!). And they are shit against starbase.

-Make it so that the penality for war actions with an AI decrease with time...

As a final note, i remember when i first played sins vanilla. There was a lot less features than today but it was far more polished. I don't care a lot about the number of new features (except a campaign editor but that not gonna happen) but i care a lot about the care developers give to these features. I think that with entrenchment diplomacy you did increase the interest of Sins but also increase the players frustration feeling because of the many broken features (many of the diplomacy fixes should have been in the game when released)

Make adds with big arrows pointing to ico button.Also put rotating spiral desgins behind the ads to hypnotize people to try mp.

For shield generator I tried to put the dunov sheild restore ability on it.Thought it might be a good idea but I couldnt make it work right.

Yeah, I thought about this recently.  It could be done by adding a variable called CanJoinFleet that the auto-join behavior would call when it detects a fleet upon entering a gravity well.  This could be toggled with a button in the fleet management menu, and wouldn't prevent you from manually creating a fleet with selected units. 

Mop up duty Carrier groups, I'm looking at you!

I think this post is the one you're referring to, ZombieRus

Ship movement should get some attention. I mean situations like...

• Ships turning in huge arcs through a visible minefield to execute a move order to a point behind them. Or just getting tangled up with other ships or structures. Most of the time turning in place would be preferred.
• Overtaking the ship you are supposed to be chasing and trying to destroy - and losing the target momentarily.

I'd have to agree with almost everything that ZombiesRus5 listed.  But some are glaring issues, and I'd like to highlight a few:

I agree that Envoys drag down an AI's military competiveness, largely because they simply just cost too much fleet supply.  I would suggest reducing a Envoy's fleet cost from 12 to 10, or even less?!

Good suggestions, that echo my earlier concerns. 

I like this idea.

YES, Especially ADVENT Diplomacy NEEDS SOME LOVE.  Advent Envoy benefits and pacts generally just plain suck!  I also shared the idea that some of these benefits should increase allegiance rather than culture spread rates, so that there would be a true economic benefit.