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We basically had the idea in discord to have small pockets of the map be inaccessible until you defeat a "fortress sector." where the enemies are more numerous and maybe even contain a randomly generated boss or something. Once the sector is cleared, the pocket will become accessible via jumps. inside this small pocket might be an enemy HQ, better drops, a high concentration of claimable asteroids or secret stashes, etc. Things that the player would like. Accessing a fortress sector would be done by a special gate that tells the player it leads to the fortress sector. You cant directly jump into it until its cleared. Afterward the player clears it, the rift/wall around the small pocket would disappear allowing hyperspace jumps in and out of it. Some kind of map marker or color would remain denoting which sectors are a part of the hidden pocket - maybe even just automatically get tagged as "secret space" with map tags.

One of the things about the AI ship is that the programming function to place turrets tries to spread turrets evenly over the entire hull. This, combined with the fact that the AI ships are kinda skinny, is why the AI ships never seem to have issues with aiming weapons while the player ships do, since players, generally speaking, prefer to place their turrets in an organized manner. I've actually ended up talking with the devs about this and submitted a fairly detailed bug report about it. I've also dropped a few showcase videos on how poor the AI targeting is on player-designed ships with organized turret placements. Believe it or not, things actually have gotten better over the last few patches, but I agree with the original poster that there is still significant room for improvement - especially when a larger ship simply stays in place, rotates, and doesn't effectively maneuver vs. smaller ships - you can see that quite clearly in the Baleful Katana behavior in this video: Note how the Baleful Katana - which is much larger than the ships it is fighting - simply rotates in place while the smaller ships maneuver around it. This sometimes causes it to be out of range of its primary target, which is something that I actually inadvertently end up taking advantage of during the 2nd fight. The Katana should try to push through the swarm of smaller ships and engage its primary target (me in the Euryale) or simply switch targets to one of its closer enemies that it can actually damage. Koonschi mentioned that this was a pathfinding issue, so he seems to be aware of what might be causing the issue and how to fix it. I'm hoping that the AI is improved in 2.0. Otherwise it will continue to remain a significant problem with combat in this game. I get why the AI tries to avoid ramming things, but it is far too cautious - especially in combat. If you are in a do-or-die combat situation, some minor hull damage from pushing through a number of smaller ships simply doesn't matter.

I feel ship designs would really benefit from all blocks being angled. Cause theres some times u just want to fill a small angled corner space with a generator or a integrity field. Or tiny angled engine.

When I'm building an economic empire, I'd like to know more details. Currently we can only look at our total cash, an individual station's (inaccurate) total income/expenditures, and a long list of sales in the economy chat window. I'd like a page in the player menu with a full economic overview of my entire empire. I'm talking graphs and charts, data that can be parsed by station type, sector, "economic impact range", etc. There are a million ways this could be implemented, but here are a few specific things that I think would add great depth to the economic side of the game, and make it more playable and manageable: ability to enter a station's "trade goods" menu from the galaxy map/player menu fleet page graphs showing cash, ores, and goods over time for your entire empire, that is also sortable by ships, station types, by sector, sector range, etc. list of all stations sortable by profit, expenses, etc. cash spent on founding and upgrading a station should be added to that station's "expenses" column so you can *actually* know how much money that station has made you. These are just a few ideas, but there is a ton more room for expanding the available information on the economic side of this game.