possible suggestion about highways?

[Honved]

Jump drives obviously create a game balance problem, where you can't really defend more than a single location, because a roughly equal enemy can just gather enough stuff into a single fleet to take it out. The only sensible counter is to gather everything of your own and jump in to oppose it, resulting in one cataclysmic battle which totally destroys one of those factions' ability to wage war in the first few hours of the game, and probably weakens the other faction to the point of being a pushover for a third race's fleet to jump in and finish the job. It's like the "Mutually Assured Destruction" policies in the 1960s and '70s.

By removing jump capability, it means that fleets have to travel sector by sector, and you have to spread your assets out to deal with local issues, because it may take days for help to arrive from the other end of the map.

Highways are NOT the solution, although I can see the need for some kind of boosters or accelerators to cut travel times across heavily travelled sectors. Packing them full of "traffic" which exists ONLY for the purpose of being a hassle to the player goes way out of bounds, and I seriously hope that the idea dies and is thoroughly shredded and burned to prevent it from ever rearing its ugly head again as a zombie idea. Rather than being an aide to the player, and an integral and believable part of the game universe, they become something to avoid if possible, and a depiction of mass insanity as hundreds of NPCs appear to willingly put themselves through that hell on a constant basis.