ship design is quite usefull in SotS, and scraping ships also ^^, there are if i remember correctly also techs which increase effency of scraping and i just love the repair ships.
you can play production mosnters spamming low lvl ships and still win in the long run or build strong armored high tech molechs who rip appart nearly anything.
You can focus fire on different ship systems, which may seem a bit mirco intense but it is just a double click. Depending on your ships speed and weapon layout you can skirmish and keep out of enemy weapon range. Cloaks actually work in the battle screen as also on the strategic map and be countered by radar techs you would need to research.
Pimping up your troop capacity, so you can have a couple of more ships in one fleet also has a huge impact.
And in Multiplayer i just love it in the public chat, when you try to communicate and haven't yet developed the language of the other players race, you see fish vocals or bird zirpzirp
Personally i like the Hivers most. You are very slow in the beginning, but if you set foot on the ground, it needs a really big effort of the enemy to get you out of a system again.
Friend of me has mastered the Zuul ... man is he a pain in the ars ^^
All races have so different playstyles it gives a huge impact on the atmosphere.
And then there are the Grand Menaces *shakeshead* i haven't seen all of them yet, but when they come either run and hide or just die in a mass exodus. Some can be handled in later game state , some start out rather inocent and get creepy powerfull over time *Puppetmaster*
Then you can have the big time fail in research when you get too greedy in the AI research
be prepared to loose at least half of your empire, which then goes totally against you and also inflicts others empires with AI techs and them also splitting apart .. total clusterfuck
Multiplier matches also are greatly solved in the way that people can join in and out while AI takes over or new players take over those AI players when they later on join in (again').
Most amazing is still the tech tree, i rarely had a game where i fully researched nearly everything. really well balanced!
