i like it too, someone made a suggestion in another thread about manually building trade/refinery ships, then plotting the path they should take, whether it be safer or more profitable but more dangerous (i.e. travelling through border worlds or NCGW's that can be attacked by pirates etc)
im for that idea also, but only if they dont make civvie ships cost fleet resources, or at least give them their own fleet resource.
on a side note, id love for the devs to release more maps. at the moment, most of the maps are pretty symmetrical and easy to fortify. this is good for MP and certain types of SP because its all even and everyone has a chance, however i reckon some maps with lots of UCGW's, uneven (geographically, at least) and more like an empire rather than a MP map would be good, especially in the next X-pack, for pirate raids and large battles. for instance, you could force a SC heavy enemy fleet to engage you in a plasma cloud GW
more on this topic, you could run a trade route through a UCGW, but have pirates attack and you wont have a fleet to defend, yada yada
i can just imagine it being more realistic
EDIT: and yes, i realise there is GalaxyForge, but what if there are some people who are lazy or unwilling to make it themselves? also, the lack of auto-downloading GalaxyForge maps over ICO is a pain...
