Well...poop.

In my opinion i think this game does this quite well. Complete 3-D would be a nightmare on a 2-D screen

i still think tht the ship to ship is to unrealistic

When i play i notice ships fly above and beneath each other alot. Planets will also spawn directly above other planets sometimes in random gen maps. Also you can 'stack' your structures....honeslty though I think the 3-D is maxed out as it is...like i said, any more and it would be a nightmare on our primitive 2-D screens. Maybe your game just hates you and refuses to please your lust for eye candy...
Here is a replay on you tube that shows ships moving up and down utilizing all 3 dimensions...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0DCv4Hq0mlM

About 3 min in ships are way above the battle and shooting down....  

Why do ships move? To engage and destroy the enemy.

Why do they have to move? Because the enemy is over there, and they are over here.

Why would the ships start turning or moving at all once the enemy is in range? To bring their most and best weapons to bear on the enemy.

OK, then, once the enemy is in range, their best weapons are hammering away at the enemy, why would they have to move at all? They don't need to at all.

Presently, navies move constantly because they can use the terrain (water) to try and evade their enemies' shots. And moving ship, moving up and down, is harder to hit.

In the lore of Sins. There is no terrain, so unless the ships could move faster than the weapons could track them, then there wouldnt be any need to move at all. A very thick hull and bigger guns would be prefered.

But what about a-la-Star Trek? With ships having many different weapons arks, thus requiring ships to turn both to brings strong weapons arks to bear and exploit the enemy's weak arks? This isn't Star Trek, this is Sins of a Solar Empire. Where ships have very thick armor, most have forward facing guns, and all ships take many hits to be destroyed.

I do agree with Eddison as well, it sucks that it doesn't look realistic b'cuz of no ship movement to actually simulate what a naval engagement would look like in a '0' gravity enviroment. One game that i've tried that does do this automatically upon engagment is EVE online.

if you've ever seen star wars, you'd see that the capital ships/frigates dont move around at all once in firing range, its the fighters that do the moving because they cant withstand more than a few hits

It would like really nice...unfortunately, it would not look realistic. I really don't understand why people think that 500m long ships dogfighting in space is realistic. I can't see that at all. And when ships using lasers, that is weapons that travel at the speed of light, and use targeting computers to ensure a 99.99% accuracy rating can be dodged just because some huge lumbering ship moved, it somehow seems very unrealistic to me.

power requierments....to keep a focused laser at full power at a long range it just takes to much power.....thats why weve had such problems with our damaging lasers. the ones we do have, have a pretty much unlimeted range but to keep them going for more than a few sec. would burn everything up







.......nvm mind i didnt really comprehend what u said untill i reread it sorry...u pose a very good question but i still think it would have somthin to do with power and the ways the beams are focused i guess...i could be wrong but i may be right

The problem was you couldn't even fire them at maximum power output before the weapon itself exploded...

LOL, really that made me laugh hard. espcially that part about eve.

People, really, don't use the word "realistic" while talking about a space strategy game, it just makes us all look like dorks. Unless of course you are discussing the physics of movement in space. But not fleet combat.

Deckard666, good question, afaik, lasers do damage by heating/melting, sort of like soldering, with distance the intensity of the beam lowers over very long distances. and like said before, lasers do need a large amount of power. the limit here in game is mostly for game's sake.

What i would really want is for all ships to have more guns, a little more variety of guns mounted on smaller ships also, of course just for looks, dont want to offset the balance

or better yet, put it on the Akkan colony ship so the colonists have to jump off and roll when they hit the surface