Reminds me somehow of Empire at War in a way. I doubt this is possible without touching the source-code. Though I'd like it.

Why do you shoot everything out of the sky Corey , this is litterally the third time you have just dismissed what I had to say without really thinking about it.  I hope this explains it just a little further, its not the whole concept but it should still bring the idea home.  Its fun having different ships for different tasks and such but it gets a little boring to just have one main base and a few little resource gathering bases , I love FO3, they have a lot of good ideas but I think that your little "empire" should be more like well an empire .  In strategy there are three major levels going from highest to lowest; strategic, operation, and tactical; FO discusses a lot in the tactical and a little bit in operational but not so much in strategic, if they increase the strategic elements this can be better than some new RTS's coming out .  O, and why are you bringing government and other issues into a game modding discussion, please stay on topic. Fortifying systems won't be the whole point of having systems for maps.  Think of having a map of 2 players, there are 7 star systems on it, one person has 3 another has 4, the person with 3 systems has a combined total of 10 planets and the one with 4 has 13 planets, that will most likely mean the person with 13 planets or 4 systems has the advantage of building more ships but the down side is you need to defend more territory with your ships and stations, which means more money, so in the whole scheme of things everything evens each other out except the player and how they deploy their fleets and spend their resources (4m+t).  This style of system for combat engagements will put an emphasis on fleet combat because there are only a few chokepoints and if you want it can now be viable to have warp as an option because the star systems will prevent the enemy to go in your defenses .  O, and it doesn't mean you don't work because you have a lot of free time , it just means you are good at managing your time .  Actually fun is an important part of your "life" its good to have some downtime from the current speed of "life", you just need to manage your downtime so it doesn't take over your work life .  

For the maps i was thinking of having star systems made from planets and a star in each, don't need to mess around with the exe files.  Simply put the maps will be the only thing really changing, you don't need to mess around with the mod to have this.  The only problem I can come up with is the size of the maps to have this, the maps would have to be a lot larger .

heres an idea...How About maken the big ship from star trek nemisis..for a speacial..ship that you could hide in a map or somethin...not for a shipyard tho cuzz more than one would get unfair (for example: like the extra ships and shipyards that is in the map editor....)

sounds like a tactical-tactical-cube to me.. not really fair o.o;;... besides.. we mimic the star trek universe, not the story.. we don't use the enterprise, or voyager or anything like that.. and i'd prefer not to either

edit: and yes.. it would lag mid and high end comps a little.. i mean, just imagine 52 or however many phaser banks coming out of one ship, and how many torpedo bays? 20 or 30 something if i'm not mistaken..

In armada 1 and 2 there was one map that was so massive that when you sent your ships somewhere it looked like they were standing still and only moved one pixel every few seconds , lol.  I forgot who made it though   .  It didn't lag, the only problem though was during that time in modding almost everyone thought more ships meant more fun, huge map with a thousand ships on it, just imagine...

The Big ship in Nemesis is the reman Warbird Scimitar.
Oh what about the Kessok from BC?
Or some Space Monsters like the Planet Killer, V'Ger, the Space Amobue or the Cristal entity?

Hi i really like Star trek armada 2 and FO is making it what it should of always been i have got two suggestions which are could the Prometheus be included i was thinking it could be built from starfleet command. My other suggestion is that is that could a captains yact be launched from one of the ships i was thinking about the intrepid class in perticular because that class as well as the galaxy and sov have actually got captains yacts in the star trek story line i think it would be a good special weapon here is a link to some pics http://www.stguardian.to/fed/shuttlemix/.