I perfer more detail

I would like to see some more frigates and cruisers. A all around end game frigate would be nice. The ones you start with just dont seem to be worth much, even upgraded.

You mean like Heavy Cruiser...

this is how you do it (the ship portion.  I still think AI should be completely overhauled):

1) you create different ship types for each race.  NOT THE SAME ROLES WITH DIFFERENT NAMES!!!!

2) you tweak the range and damage for each individual ship type so that they are balanced.  AOE III did this amazingly, as no two civilizations had the same barracks units, but they were amazingly balanced.
hell, even randomly removing one ship type from each race would make it more interesting.  give you a weakness to exploit, and the same for enemies.

3)you beta test for maximum balance and bugs.

that's all you need.  It may require more imagination, but it makes a much better overall game.

Dont like all of your ideas but i think that boarding ships and more/better suport ships are brilliant ideas.

I personally think that the ability to board ships to capture them when they are knackered frm battle is an oppurtunity to enhance the gameplay that ironclad never considered. Wouldnt be to hard to balance, for example you could have to meet criteria such as damaging a ship to a certain point, then using the akkan ionbolt or giving the bombers a disabling ability (for instance) to disable the ship and then mark it for capture (to prevent the fleet killing it), then send in a boarding ship within a certain amount of time before the disabling effect wears off to capture it. Or sumin like that. And I doubt it would turn into a case of lose a ship = replace it with enemy ship because in the heat of a sins battle boarding ships wouldnt have a 100% success rate even if they did start boarding and you would be limited by your fleet supply.

As for support ships well atm fleet support ships (i mean as in repair for example) arent as fleshed out as they could be. Maybe a couple more support ships and more options for currently existing ones could add a decent layer of strategy to the combat.

Though as for people sugestions on new cap ships that I've seen here and there, nah I dont think so. All things considered there are plenty of them per race, their all different enough to be usefull in their own right and they're balenced pretty well.

As for super dreadnought things ,,,erm NO for heaven sakes people it wouldnt work. And if it does the beta will be a nightmare

its called gravity warhead.

makes phase jumps impossible

then phase stab is all you got.

haha... all your phase belong to us...

I'd simply like to see ships that do something other than line up and shoot at each other.  There are so many other attacking dynamics possible.  What about ramming?  Or what about something that opens it's jaws and clamps down onto another ship?

In fairness, there already is some creativity there - with those advent cruisers that can push around other frigates, and with vasari subverters with the "in grav well phase jump" and disable, etc.  But let's have more!

Also, what about technologies like cloaking?

Currently the Vasari scout is the only ship with a cloak that I know of. And to my knowledge its not a true cloak, the enemy can still see you, just cant hit you. The problem with cloaking is you just know someones gonna scream imba the minute they even announce it, or state their thinking about looking into it. Making it balanced will be a bear for them as well. A idea I had for a cloaked ship would be a frigate with no weapons, all it does is capture enemy ships. The enemy ships shields would need to be down, so obviously you couldn't just use the ship alone. Ships moving during combat would be nice, but tbh it doesnt bother me that the caps do it, just the smaller ships.