This is just a wish, since it can't be done on Sins :C please prove me wrong though...

   When I wrote my own games, I would put in hot spots for engines, shields, weapons, fuel tanks, etc.  When you hit any point on the ship, the distance to the hot spots were calculated with a gaussian distribution, that way, you could "target the engines", and have the ship dead in space and fly away if their weapons were too powerful.

   It added a dimension to the games, as it wasn't about logistics, but tactical prowess.  Such tactics would make things like tractor beams an integral part of the game (as you would need to tow away the crippled vessel, or protect it from enemy fire, thus complicating your invasion plans).

   Of course, to make protecting crippled ships worthwhile, the ships have to be expensive and take forever to build, and I HATE playing Sins that way   If one of my planets survives an attack and a hanger bay barely survives, I just scuttle it and rebuild, it's tons faster.  Also, when an enemy fleet attacks, I just keep replacing defences.  Once I built gauss platforms in a train around the planet, replacing the last one destroyed, and the attacking ship was one of those Atlantian Dreadnaughts (level 10!), and I defeated it, even with that 75% shield restore (My fleet was caught on the other side of the galaxy at the time).  Since then, I made the Atlantians "Selectable=FALSE", until I can replace them with something from the proper stargate universe

   Anyway, my point is that logistics wins every time in a game based on exponential growth (but SINS makes every conceivable effort to put the dampeners on that exponential growth), it's just the nature of the beast...

-helioforge