This is probably hard to explain but ok, if capital ships do come out, how about only one player who is playing the part as the capship captain gets to play something else like the commander mode. The commander mode gets a stragetic display(elite style radar) of the all the ships that is 9000 away. No the commander does not get to play like that in homeworld style.. But all the ships and vessels have to authorize with the capital ship or join a group if the commander wants all the vessels to be reconized by him so that he could bark commands at the fighter wing and tell them where the ships are supposed to go. No the commander won't and ever get a chance to control the AI ships..

I believe Natural Selection and allegiance has this.

I hope someone can understand this idea.

I think I know what you mean, Tilt...

In order to effectively coordinate a battle, a commander has to "see" further than the current 3k radar range. I expect once we get capital ships that controlling them will be a much different matter than the first person HUD we have now for the fighter class ships. I like to think the commander will be able to "step outside" the ship and see everything from a distance, plotting waypoints for the cap ship to follow.

I wonder if anyone else likes the idea.

Yeah, I love it. However, it'd require a lot of extra work that we probably wont see for quite a bit. One of the things I really hated about homeworld was the fact that I couldnt directly control the ships, the pilots suck:p

How about Allegiance style? Commander has a flat-2D view of the battle (easy to do, just have a camera placed a certain distance above all the action, zoomed out) and have a simple HUD icon around ships. The Commander could select ships and order them to move somewhere or do something, which would be handled just like Allegiance, perhaps.

Perhaps there would be a commander who would have a tactical view like the one decribed by SG1, and also a skipper who directly manipulated the steering controls for the cap ship. the commander (captain) would issue commands, and the skipper would carry them out. On smaller cap ships, the roles of captain and skipper could be one and the same.