Hello all,
I've only recently started playing, and so far I'm only using the DL version and playing the original campaign even though I have the Ultimate version (I'll be swithing to that later). When I first encountered the Dread Lords' vastly superior ships, I qu8ickly learned there were only two things I could do to keep my own ships safe: Speed and sensors! Speed should be obvious, but sensors are also required, or else you'll end up your moves so close to an enemy ship without knowing that it may be mopped up by any hostile ship in the vicinity that happens to move your way.
I decided it would be best to get my sensors range about as far as I could move. Or, better yet, further than the enemy could move. While, technically, it should be sufficient to have sensors better than your enemys', I repeatedly witnessed ships deliberately moving towards my positions, even when they shouldn't have been able to spot me.
In any case, I considered the +1 Sensor range bonus from the tech to be so helpful that I wondered just how useful it would be to pick up some more range from abilities. In my case this was mainly motivated by having to face the Dread Lords, but I suppose in any reasonably difficult settings you'll have to face superior ships of another race eventually, and then it would be equally useful.
When I look at the racial abilities, just 3 points buy me an additional 4 points to sensor range! As I said, I was trying to match my sensors to my speed, so I looked at the +speed ability as well, but the 5 points cost for a meagre +1 bonus? That was a big no-no! I've been spending those 3 points on sensors since then and never looked back. It is so incredibly useful to have each and every ship with a visibility range the width of an entire sector, without wasting any space for actual modules, I can't think of any better use for those points, other than maybe economy.
I wondered how others feel about it. I've read about other people's preferred picks, and the only mention of Sensors I've seen were to the effect of making a point these would be useless. 
Err.... what? Why is it that (some) others consider the sensor racial ability to be so useles that they consider it worth spending some extra effort in pointing out as much, while I appear to be doing incredibly well with it? Am I missing something? Has the game changed so much from DL to DA/TA that for some reason unknown to me that ability has become useless? Or am I the first one to recognize their value? I am somewhat doubtful of the last... So, please, can someone enlighten me?
