Not to throw cold water... but I like the way the current game sticks at least somewhat close to realism, with space being mostly empty and easy to cross between star systems and inside planetary systems.

The only "barriers" are areas of effect from military starbases, mobile enemy fleets, and asteroid fields. And even that latter isn't very realistic as something that blocks movement, since asteroids and other debris mostly orbit in one plane in real planetary systems. We've managed to send the Voyager probes out into (almost) interstellar space, twice the distance of Pluto from the Sun, without hitting anything.

I don't like fantasy effects like gas or dust nebulas that cause ships to slow down, or lose sensor range, or any of the other bizarre effects you see in Star Trek episodes. That's just arbitrary and unrealistic, IMO... devices to drive a storyline. Player-built mine fields don't make sense to me either, considering the huge volume of space they'd need to cover.

Maybe I'm just being an old "hard sci-fi" curmudgeon here, but I like the current game design where space is open and easy to cross, unless someone gets in your way and starts shooting at you. Space-based games don't need to copy all the conventions of terrain-based strategy games to be challenging. On the larger and more thinly-populated galaxy maps, just dealing with all that open distance is itself a challenge, until you tech up to faster ships, longer range, and better sensors. Without that feeling of vast emptiness between worlds, it just wouldn't feel like a space game to me.

P.S. on the idea of impassable asteroid fields... I think that can be done with the map editor for a custom scenario, although it does use the mine-able fields. Brad posted this one in an AAR/demo for DA:

WWW Link

Well, you can do that, at least in part, by laying out a string of military starbases with ship speed augmenting modules.

I do like the interspace warp links idea.

...except one crucial difference - density. If you want to be even more sci-fi-entific, then one can say that the wrap drive capability of "warping" the space is inversely proportional to the density of the matter in the surrounding space. This, by the way, would perfectly explain why it takes only slightly longer time to travel between the stars, where density is lower than to travel between the planets, where density is much higher. So I see quite "realistic" to have some gas nebulae that so significantly slow down the wrap drive powered ship so that it essentially is impassible to go through them.

And imagine the beautiful graphics that can go with it - gas nebula coming out from some star system...



Option #1 you can build it yourself by constructors. The # of wrap lines would be limited by technology level, similar like the number of trade roots. May be even the global amount is limited as well, like special projects, you build it and no one can build it more.

Option #2, if I remember the lore correctly, before the terrans invented the wrap drives, the inter-star travel was done through the gates. So, this could be some kind of faster gate system from ancient civilization.

More over, the wrap anomalies (or what you call it?) are already in the game, but they for some mysterious reason disappear after the explorer travels through them one time.