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[DatonKallandor]

I think games like I-War that have theoretically lots of ships and lots of real estate to cover "cheat" by only tracking precise locations and status when stuff is actually within the players sensor range - and continue to track within a certain amount of leaving sensor range should the player happen to follow a specific fleet.

That seems like something you can adapt quite easily to Starsector - after all there's no point in tracking the exact hull status of an enemy fleet if you've been out of sensor range contact for 2 days. You can assume they've repaired and reorganized, since "sensor range" in this case means they've been in a different system than you for a long period of time.

[Giangiotto]

How I would do it:

-Sector player is in is fully simulated similar to now
-Other sectors keep one generic 'strength' record for type of fleet (eg. Defense, supply, scout), this number changes to simulate combat based on the 'strength' on the enemy fleet types
-When the player moves into one such sector the game generates fleets based on the numbers
-A sector the player has been to but has left keeps some degree of information (eg. Capital ships) for some time before becoming a simulated sector again after X time

I realize my suggestion is rather drastic but I fear for the RAM usage of this game.

[Zaphide]

I really don't think it has to be that drastic though. Easiest just to have full fleet details for fleets in the players system, and then all other systems have a 'fleet token' that just stores the hull variants in the fleet and the commander stats. AI fleets will have pre-defined variants (no customs) so you don't need to really store much.

Then when player moves into a different system, all those fleet tokens just get converted into real fleets, and the previous systems fleets get converted into fleet tokens.

And there is no reason the frequency of updates in systems the player isn't in can't be lowered to like 1/60th rather than 1/10th (or even once per StarSector day). Anyway, it's all fairly non-trivial I imagine so not something you want to embark on without a real need (and currently there is no real need). If you start optimizing too early it usually makes refactoring/changes excruciatingly difficult later.

re. SPAZ - although I thought SPAZ was a great game, it felt a little too much like a sequence of arenas in my mind. There was too much 'disconnect' between leaving a system and coming back.

re. Exerelin - I wouldn't really view Exerelin performance as indicative of StarSector performance, as it is an unoptimized mod on top of an unoptimized StarSector

[frag971]

What about asyncronous simulation? You don't have to simulate everything in real time, maybe delay simulations while in space and "catch up" when a player is in station/battle?

Also, completely unrelated: I wish t he distance between system was larger, to make fuel matter more. if i want a long travel i better damn bring a hauler.

[Magician]

It will be a good idea in case few changes are made:
1) Traveling itself is a difficult choice which can lead to uncertain outcomes, and requires chains of smaller choices which affect how successfull your traveling is. For now its "bring fuel and click on map - wait" and player almost unaffected by the fact that he is in another part of the starsector. If you will take for example such game as EvE online, you can literaly wander into wrong neighbourhood and lose everything you have, just because you didn't know some corps were planning something near destination of your travel.
2) Traveling itself should be divided into smaller bits, where you have to make different choices and this will affect your traveling/life. Space has to be more random, more uncertain, more unpredictable.
In case such or similiar changes are done to game, increase in fuel consumption will be only a reasonable tweaking to ensure excitement and challange of traveling in space.

Probably something like this will be implemented anyway in future releases if other mechanics are implemented.