Sins has been a favorite of mine since it was released. I still remember the old TEC bomber design, the carrier cruisers carrying only one squadron, and the AI sending in massive waves of siege frigates. The game has changed a lot since then, all for the better, and I credit the developers for keeping up with it. Below is some feedback on Rebellion Beta 2 in particular.
1) On one of the standard small maps, I was playing TEC Loyalist vs Hard AI TEC Rebel. I was attacking their Akkan in their home planet with LRF. Their Akkan jumped back to a nearby Asteroid after taking heavy damage. However, some of the missiles from my LRF were still en route to the Akkan while it jumped away. Those missiles appeared to keep going off towards the asteroid and out of the current planet's gravity well, but I didn't pay much attention to it. Minutes later the Akkan came back, and a short while after that, a slew of LRF missiles appeared to come from outside the gravity well, following it; but these missles appeared to be coming not from my frigates, but from the asteroid! In other words, the missiles that were fired before just kept going to the target across the map. For performance reasons I would imagine this would not be desirable. (I am not sure if the missiles that came back did any damage to the Akkan.)
2) In the same game as described above, there was a point in time where their Akkan kept jumping into their home world to protect it from my attack, but then immediately jumped out again - probably because it had about 10% hit points remaining. This jumping in/out kept going on and on. Not a big deal, but it would make more sense if the AI kept their ship in the other grav well (which I wasn't attacking) to repair.
3) The most annoying thing in Sins are the unit production sounds. I can turn off voices in the sound menu, but then I lose not only the desirable ship sounds in-game but also the UI voice that alerts me to things like pirate attacks. Please add some way of disabling the ship production sounds. A simple UI checkbox in the sound menu would be one way of accomplishing this.
4) I love the new effects on the stars and the new lighting system. I love the new weapon effects, especially the missiles.
5) I also love the new skyboxes. Thank you for adding more of them. As someone who has played Sins to death, seeing the same red/green/blue skyboxes over and over has become repetitive. I eventually turned them off because I was sick of them. I actually suggest adding more skyboxes given that some people play this game a lot and even the new images will become repetitive over time. Perhaps NASA has some high-res public domain space images that can be grabbed and made use of in this manner at no cost.
6) I like that there is more music. Like with the skyboxes, hearing the same music over and over gets repetitive, and I eventually turned the music off and found other things to listen to in-game or listened to nothing at all. Glad to see the existing tracks were added to. Thanks. 
7) For the TEC starbases, how about a purchasable culture-blocking mechanism (similar to what capital ships can do)? Given the defensive nature of the TEC loyalists, such an upgrade might fit in well with them. Another option would be a re-broadcast tower that takes existing signals and amplifies them, but doesn't actually produce any signals of its own. The idea with this would be to better propagate existing signals through non-colonized gravity wells.
8) Novalith cannons seem to permanently reduce the maximum population a planet can sustain. It would be nice if this could be overcome in some manner, either by the max population cap slowly gaining back to its former amount, or some other upgrade that would prevent it entirely (like if a shield generator is present).
9) Annoyance: Novalith cannons start off auto-firing upon completion. By the time I realize construction has been done, I can't usually navigate back to that planet and turn it off before it's fired. I've had just-built Novaliths auto-cast into a distant star system, then 20 minutes later I've captured a planet in that system and see one of my incoming warheads... aimed for that planet. Next thing I know, I no longer have that planet. Some sort of grace period for the Novalith would be nice, maybe a 10 second delay after completion of the structure to allow players time to click on it and (if they want) disable the auto-cast. (I realize it takes them time to rotate before they can fire, but in some cases they're already pointed in the "right" direction so there is no rotational delay after they're built. In any case, adding a 10 second delay on build wouldn't affect the rotational delay, so for situations where it has to turn, nothing would actually change.)
10) Annoyance: Mines. In some games vs. the AI, I spend inordinate amounts of time mopping up mines in EVERY system. The scout frigates need to have a better mine-clearing capability than they do now; as it is, I must manually issue their orders and this takes considerable time and attention. I get that mines should slow down an advancing enemy, but this often seems overdone.
11) Some of the achievements in Steam aren't working. Notables: He's no good to me dead!, Union Buster, Dead Canaries, Pirate Exterminator. Many of the others are working correctly.
12) Speaking of Steam: Thank you for offering this game through Steam!
13) The AI in this beta seems to overdo the capital ships. At some point they actually stop building small ships entirely. It's made it a little more difficult to "test" the AI in longer games.
14) Ship names. It's a little annoying seeing that I have one "TDN Vigilus" in my fleet and my TEC opponent also has a "TDN Vigilus" in theirs. I assume TDN stands for Trader Defense Network or some such. In the 'Player Setup' options, why not allow players to set their own custom capital ship prefix? It would also be nice if we could change the default ship names that our faction uses. And yes, I realize there is a ship name text file I could edit, but changing that file applies those names to all TEC ships of every faction.
15) As with the music and skyboxes, it might help to add some additional faction icons, faction names, and faction picture sets in order to avoid visual repetition and thus visual fatigue over time. (e.g. seeing the same "Galam Rim Union" group with the same TEC picture seemingly every other game.)
16) I'd like to see an option to turn off Titans in the pre-game setup phase. I want to point out that I like the Titans as a feature. I'm sure they'll go through some post-release balancing after careful consideration by the team, so I'm not too personally concerned with any seemingly annoying implementation issues in the beta. They're also really fun to use. But like being able to turn off pirates and control for other major features in the pre-game setup panel, having this as an option would be nice to have.
That's it for the moment. Thanks for making such an awesome game!
