The key to strategic advantage is scouting these gates, and protecting them efficiently by claiming a gate, you retain rights to jump through it, but enemies have to destroy the portal you've built over it before they can. Virtual 'choke points', as it were. It does expose the paranoia of players really well though because of large maps with many different systems, you can never know just how secure your defenses are until you've explored every part of space for possible warp gates. Another original touch is the 'supply' element that is applied to all ships. While there's no specific 'behavioral AI', specific advantages are given when certain combinations of ships are grouped together into fleets.
Experimentation is the key to seeing what fleets give the best results for each situation.
One of the abilities of one race high up on the technology tree is being able to create your own warp holes obviously this will an expensive, but potentially devastating to the opposition, task. Terrain is handled mainly at a 2D level even though you're in the three dimensions of space. Attacks can't be made from anything other than the traditional four angles, and maps will have the standard array of hazards and obstacles that you see in RTS games handled on the ground. Multiplayer is also a high priority games will support up to 8 players on a LAN, but only four on the Net due to the high latency requirements of the unit counts in the game. There's plans for a random map feature, much like the very popular feature provided in Age of Empires , to maximize replayability.