I think it's fine. There's several ways to counter it.



There's a tech that lets you see what ships (and their weapons/defense) are in a fleet if they get into sensor range. This combined with several sensor range techs can let you see an incoming enemy fleet 2-3 turns out, what is in (letting you pick a fleet to counter it perfectly) and still have time to respond. Also consider it takes about 4-5 turns to invade a system, even with invasion subsystems (even longer if you have defense... some systems can even be unassailable without a very strong fleet). So all up you could have 6-8 turns to bring a fleet in and stop their fleet.



Also SOTS had "unrestrained" travel and worked fine. Both Zuul and Humans had restricted space lanes, yet they could still keep up with Morrigi, Liir and Tarkas, none of which had space lane restrictions. (And honestly, Zuul and Humans were usually on the offensive, since they faster travel from space lanes let them expand much more quickly, and reach their opponents systems faster).

Warp availability is only one of several possible imbalances in the tech tree now. As it is, the tech tree feels like it is progressing too fast for my taste. I presume it is going to get tuned before release.

I had an idea that could balance the warp drive:

- make it a tonnage heavy engine (like really tonnage heavy and i think the tonnage should be percentage based on the model size (so that it would be more expansive the bigger the ships gets) that way you could have deep strikers but at the cost of lot of fighting power

Yeah, imagine going up against another human player who is using Warp Drive! It would be pretty difficult, and might boil the game down to sheer numbers advantage.



Platescale, good idea on the scout ships, I forgot about that possibility.



That map above would be an absolute nightmare with AI Warp Drive usage! Wow. The more I think about it, the more Warp Drive worries me. I don't know if we can really tell its effect on the game until multiplayer gets released...

I too think there should be limitations to the warp drive.

It is fine in the smaller Galaxies but in the bigger ones its just pure Chaos.

The only thing that keeps the game from getting out of hand is that the AI isn't using it properly.



Maybe a picture illustrates it better:



This would be undefendable if the AI was doing it right. (Yes it is a very weird situation but as you can see this stuff happens, and no I can't push orange because he is the only one that rivals my fleet when I try to be offensive there and I'm fighting against everybody because it seems the AI wont let you make peace right now)

Whoa, warp drives aren't THAT powerful. I find they mostly let you bypass constellation edges. They reduce the value of wormholes. I'm pretty sure warp drives are slower than string drives even at the end game. If you're worried about angle of attack considerations, there are structures you can build to enhance the sensor ranges of your systems - but even more cost-effective than that is just to station scout ships around your fringe. Scout ships have a huge sensor radius and they're not expensive. Finally, if you really hate the influence of warp drives, try going into the map settings and set wormholes to high and string density to high. Since that dramatically increases the mobility of ordinary drives, warp drives won't make much difference anymore.

There is a game event that increase your detection radius of +100% in addition to what you can achieve with technology level, but it basically just show ships that are 3-4 clicks away max from a planet with max sensor.

So yes the warp system is challenging. Should it be remove? Not sure yet, or not at all, i'm in a mid-game like yourself, havent seen yet how AI is using it in full.



edit : typo

Interesting point. Warp drive could be restricted so that it allows warp travelling only inside your own system. Pretend that there are 4 suns. A, B, C and D. If the player owns them all he can travel from A to D. Warp drive could allow the player to change fleet posture quickly. After warp drive, all the movement points could be consumed, so that would restrict the ability to use it as a surprise attack.. No matter the distance travelled. And so the players fleet would appear on his/her starsystem closest to the borders and enemies could be aware of the presence before it is crucial.

I agree, I think it's too easy to get and is way too powerful. If you get it before your enemy you can just jump over and start attacking them without any fear of them trying to take a planet in retaliation. There should be some downside to using warp drive, if you couldn't attack for a turn after using it, it might give people some time to prepare a retaliation before they do too much damage, and it will make the decision to use it harder - instead of it just being a super go anywhere upgrade. The only problem is there's no way at the moment to tell ships whether to use it or not.