[quote=@Crispy Octopus]
[@Willy Vereb]

The Interstellar economy is highly developed. Very few, if any, planets are actually capable of autarky anymore. Blockading your own system would effectively immediately remove your ability to fight the war, and once the enemy eventually clear the mines you're doomed. 

You can certainly try to seal yourself off, but given any gate can connect to any gate you're just hurting yourself. Moreover, I imagine (given the ITC, a power bloc) that by now a number of treaties regarding gate commerce have been passed, or forced, by or onto the governments of the Cluster.

So sure, you can cut yourself off. Your people will probably starve and your economy is almost certain to collapse, but don't worry! Once you eventually open your gate again you're going to be sanctioned and persecuted by just about every major trading nation.

That's my take. Sigma and Hyper can chime in if their opinions differ. 
[/quote]I meant to post a longer response but I feel in the current format the constant back and forth exchanges would not help and would not resolve in a timely manner thus further frustrate players.

I don't think interdependent economies are plausible with entire star systems' worth of raw materials. Maybe if you play almost absolutely hard sci-fi but that's a fringe nobody will do (and you'd effectively have to reject all NS submissions that way). I also don't think the solution you came up with is sufficient to prevent abuses.

I'd propose a solution more grounded in the mechanism of the gates. You see in order to transfer untold metric tons of mass through some wormhole style travel mechanism it'd require ridiculous amounts of energy. Since this is soft sci-fi we don't need to think hard about this but it could open a possibility. Basically when a gate transit happens it is accompanied with a gigantic radiation burst, enough to fry electronics in 10,000 mile radius and blind sensors for a while. Due to the specifics of the gate transfer the object coming through the gate is immune to this effect thus they can safely fly out of it. The consequences? Gate camping is not only ineffective, it'd be actively dangerous. So instead of mining up regions or ready to snipe ships at the gate, both sides have ample time to position up for an upcoming proper battle.
This should resolve one problem.

As for the isolation shenanigans, while I criticize it, being made an interstellar pariah is a good deterrent as any for now. Still, I feel a bit strange with the idea of an interconnected economic block involving the whole playerbase. This would require syncing sheets to a ridiculous degree. Does this game really wants to run by this or it's just something you thought about in response to my post? I feel this is a gigantic matter which would be put at the forefront for the OOC because it changes basically everything you do in this game compared to normal nationgames. Actually, this way it would not be a space opera at all, rather playing a cold war era NRP with less doomsday concerns but the exact same political shenanigans and overall discouraging of any direct military actions whatsoever.