Liked the Big maps...
Liked the warping in thing, although, warping into an Ion Cloud sucked. And the AI will ALWAYS blindly fly right through the Ion cloud. With a little finesse, you can kill the enemy AI merely by leading them through Ion clouds...hilarious...
I did have a bit of an annoyance with the Ion Storm terrain. Constantly having to fly around Ion Storms also got a little old.
I was never unfortunate enough to warp into an ion storm, but the AI seemed to have absolutely no clue that it was there.
The AI will avoid roks, it will avoid planets, it will avoid suns, and it will avoid black holes. But as Krueg says, Ion Storms it will just run right through.
I think the key here is careful map design. Only use Ion Storms in a few, carefully selected hexs. (Like, any Klink base hex that is supposed to be manned by Vudar, maybe.) But don't make them general-use terrain features.
-S'Cipio