Hello,
As a long time Sins player and modder, I would like to make a few suggestions for Sins 2. I haven't played the pre-release yet so I apologize if these ideas are already implemented in some form.
1. Titan death penalty
There should be a way to set Titan death penalties in the game options before starting a new game. The penalties could be customizable, for example the Titan could lose a user definable number of levels upon re-construction, it could cost more or it could take longer to build. From what I've read about Sins 2, Titans can be customized with various upgrades. This may be another avenue to implement a death penalty.
2. Late-game random events to shake things up
I would like to see some sort of diplomatic blunder or galactic war event occur late-game which torpedos relationships between factions or results in all factions going to war with each other for a while. In the original Sins, it seems like alliance changes occur very infrequently.
3. Small fleet sizes
As a fan of classics like Freespace and Star wars, I like to see smaller fleet battles, where the tactics of each ship play an important role (instead of frigate spamming). In all of my mods, I significantly lower supply cost for capital ships while making the gap between capital ships and frigates larger, so that frigate spaming is less effective. The computer still tends to build fleets comprised mostly of frigates though. It would be nice if choosing "smaller fleet sizes" resulted in a change of tactics for AI players and a change in stats for the different ship classes to yield a different "feel".
Looking forward to the finished product, which is when I will be upgrading my PC 
