SE's biggest problem is that you can't kill enemy ships if they are faster than you. They can then run around blowing up your stuff like crazy. You end up building massed Cruisers, the biggest ship you can get for the max top speed to stop the enemy running around your defensive ships. It got really boring after a while.
That's true of basically everything, though. If something is faster than you, it decides when and if it fights. Short of games filled with artificial bounding boxes, in any open environment without natural obstacles to pin your opponent in, there's nothing you can do about an opponent that's faster and outranges you.
You should still very easily be able to have weapons that are faster than them. Also sci fi games have tons of ideas like hyperdrive inhibitors or short ranged teleportation/jumping and so on.
In other games, you can blockade the crap out of areas, which allows you to defend with smaller ships. There are reasons why battlestations are strongpoints in a defense network. In SE, that doesn't happen. A faster ship can literally run right past your defending ship sitting on a wormhole entry because the computer randomly places your ship OUT OF WEAPONS RANGE of the entry it was supposed to defend. That is the most frustrating thing about SE that I recall.
Since MoO2 is such a fast-paced game I'm not sure what would be gained from having a bigger galaxy. Longer endgame grind with Xentronium armor and all sorts of superweapons all around? Meh...
It's more authentic like that anyway; games usually lasted two whole days when playing on a 68040 Mac in my youth...
