Don't take away my 160 sensor range and 160 moves ship away! It's the only thing which can annihilate the AI in late game in a reasonable time since the AI currently isn't good in managing on huge maps so it gets really boring.
I think that the AI should be more capable of managing the late game and build reasonable fleets faster then 3 moves per turn.
A limit for the moves and sensors isn't that important in my opinion since it only speeds up the late game:
In late game the actions you need to make per turn get more since the civilization grows so an attack or even the construction of an attack fleet takes a lot of time since the trns take long. A higher speed of the ships however reduces the time between attacks and make the game more exciting.
However I see that a slight reduction of the speed and sensor range is needed since a sensor range of 160 is ridiculous since you can see almost a quarter of a huge map.
I'd also like to suggest to add a bit more depth to the travelling of ships and fleets other than just travelling. Something which needs some player interaction like some events or something like flying modes which add bonuses of any kind.
At least something which makes longer journeys more interesting.
Events for ships would be horrible once you're using a couple of hundred separate fleets, tbh. Nice idea early on, but later it'd become a hell-fest every turn unless the occurrence rate was tiny.
As for higher speed being necessary in the late game... yes, that's why engines get faster. But we're moving too quickly from really early on - by the mid game 25-30 hexes is not an unusual speed for a medium warship, and my early-game constructors and colony ships often have 10+ moves. Switching to hull % based is a good move, since you can set up a limit of, say, 10 engines per ship - that means you can have a ship that's half engine and it'll still move 35 spaces at end-game and be able to fight reasonably effectively. That's plenty.
The alternatives are end-move-on-attack, which I actually like (because the AI already does it, which means attacking multiple targets a turn is actually a player-only exploit) but could become very micro-managey if people keep their fleets split up, and Newtonian physics, where bigger hulls just have negative movement % to counter the extra engines. That's harder to balance and gives more or less the same result as the % mass engines do (and is what I did, mostly because I didn't think of using %-mass engines until a couple of weeks after I'd wasted several hours mucking about in spreadsheets doing the Newtonian stuff. Ho hum).
