Ship orientation for large ships is a good idea too. It shapes the battlefield by having each side try to maneuver into "blind spots"

Sid Meier's Starships had a decent answer to this.

Space is not all that empty when you consider where battles *should* take place.

Unless you intercept a force mid-way, you're likely to have forces battle near a large body or asteroid field.

That's what Sid Meier provides, and that's what sci-fi movies and tv shows focus on as well.

Once you've chosen to do accordingly (battle with actual space bodies in mind), it is easy to affix each their own value and build from there.

Sid Meier's Starships has a lot of misses, but I feel that it was an elegant design decision than to focus on battles closer to bodies.

If my ships are less good than my opponent, I'd be crazy to meet him in free open space, I'd be a sitting duck. I would much rather fight it out near something that evens the odds for me. Assuming that this holds for at least one of the combatants, you'd never fight in the middle of nowhere.

There's an episode in Star Trek TNG where the starfleet sends a fleet to block a convoy of cloaked romulan ships. They set up a detection network between the ships that is able to detect cloaked ships passing through it.

You could adapt this idea and give your fleets the ability to shape in some way the battlefield. For instance, several ships could set up a network in an area to:

• Disable hyperspace drive.
• Inhibit enemy sensors, so their units are basically hidden from any enemy detection inside that area.
• Create a gravitational disruption that would trap enemy ships in the area, or make the movement nearby harder.
• Shield that area from fire coming from outside.
• Detect cloaked enemy vessels, of course.

The big change is that now shaping the battlefield is part of your gameplay and setting up network areas and sabotaging the other players' network areas becomes part of the strategy. Also, it gives something else to do with your fleets than charging against the enemy.

Well, some of the best "space combat games" I have seen basically took the naval technology and strategies and applied them to spaceships. Not realistic, but quite entertaining.

Going broadside to maximize your firepower but at same time at the cost of greater vulnerability to incoming fire, turrets with limited fields of fire due to superstructure, "space torpedo" like unguided or semi-guided rockets, floating minefields and all this can make for interesting tactics that gives you a ton of possibilities that might sound quite intuitive for many players.

But really, its a sci-fi theme, it can be anything you like. How about using asteroids from an asteroids belt as weapons of mass destructions, having to aim with incredible precision so the asteroid is not just exiting the solar system at the other end without hitting anything, and the defenders having to stop the approaching asteroids before its to late?

How about space battles going in the same direction naval battles did at the beginning of the 20th century, where fighting distances moved from 8 km point blank battles fought on sight to 20 km+ artillery duels were the better gun control systems were more important than the better guns?

How about space ships engaging in 100's of kms distance, way before they can see each other, using some future technology to predict the position of the enemy ship, and the vast computing power of future super computers to compute the correct targetting points for lasers, beam weapons or missiles?

How about exotic super weapons that travel faster than light, and thus can be used to accurately attack enemy formation over even longer distances? The wormhole cannon, so to speak.

Or even cooler, how about low-tech space battles were commercial unarmed space ships and mining / scientifical equipment is used to force a competing spaceship out of its orbit / away from an asteroid to mine?

Using grappling arms to sling asteroids at each other, ramming, EMP like effects, hacking, and whatnot.

That kind of "space combat" could explain shorter ranges, and might make for some interesting tactics.