Suspension of disbelief is good in sci fi Scifibookguy... but I just can't...Stardogs? Seriously though you read it?
Well, you guys covered most of the topic, here is my two cents. I find starlanes realizatiom (game rules, not code) clunkier then free movement. In SEV starlane/wormhole endpoints were THE places where you want to park a defense fleet. Relatively fast interplanetary movement (you could traverse whole star system in 2 turns mid-game and in 1 turn late game) only augmented the importance of that one hex. MoO:CtS suffers from opposite problem, interplanetary movement is too slow, you can only visit one "point" in the star system per turn and starlane endpoints are one of them. Each starlane on the path effectively adds 2 turns to travel time regardless of FTL speed. Well both games suffer from how starlanes combine with interplanetary movement and for that MoO 3 starlanes are the best implementation among those 3 games (haven't played other 4Xs with starlanes). It had an annoying quirk too, you could travel "off lane" but it was never a shorter trip. Thing is starlanes multiply base speed by factor of something like 10 or 20 so it's almost always faster to make a few hops through starlanes then to travel straight. Combine that with reserve and mobilization center mechanics which practically allowed you to teleport ships anywhere in your empire and you get even less reasons for long off lane missions. I'm personally not a fan of chokepoints, they tend to turn the game of tactics to a thug of war. Then again if MoO 3 and 4 had proper special weapons the it could have been averted. Remember Black Hole Generator from MoO 1, when an enemy attacks you with a stack of 32000 small and then you ask him where are his shields? Fun times .
I've only played MoO2 unfortunately. And MoO3 but I didn't like it so it doesn't count. There wasn't any starlanes was there? It's been such a long time.
Choice is always good and I agree that Stellaris does a fine job of satisfying all camps. When I play Stellaris I just restrict everybody to warp and forget that starlanes even exist. Win, win. My only concern for PSS is that developing (and balancing) such a comprehensive system of FTL choice would take limited dev time away from far more important issues. Indeed, MOO-Cts's truly bizarre implementation of starlanes ended up being even more claustrophobic, time consuming and restrictive than "ordinary" starlanes seen in other games. You really have to wonder what the hell they were thinking - or not thinking as the case may be. Yes MOO 3 had starlanes. You were also theoretically able to travel "off road" but it was so slow that it was utterly useless. Like many things in MOO 3 the concept was interesting but the implementation was completely broken. MOO-Cts didn't even bother trying to implement an off road system, broken or otherwise, probably because it would have confused their children-with-tablets casual target audience far too much. Instead they concentrated on shiny graphics and writing more cat jokes for the Mrrshan Empress to say.
