Overheating * weapons/lasers/plasma

Errr, personally, no. I don't like the idea of forcing the player to think about his weapons overheating whilst in the middle of strategic planning or during skirmishes. It's good enough how it is now where some weapons take energy to fire.

Well, depends on how it's implemented i guess, it's one thing to have a weapon that can fire realy fast aor a few seconds, it's a totaly different thing to have a weapon that after a few minutes of constant use needs a bit of "regeneration time"

You can see the fire rate of a weapon as a cooldown time.
In TA the more powerfull lasers also shot slower.

Anyway, if there is a cooldown time, you should be able to have a
rapid fire modus as well what causes overheating

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Just a few points from my experiences with TA:

Firstly if you had a large enought mass of (laser) defences then their continual firing was a major increase in energy usage which could lead to your resources running out and then they'd be unable to fire and you economy was stalled, or you'd have to manage your defences or other energy draining activities to maintain some defence.

Secondly, I believe it was MADTA that devised a unit (a higher tech turret, the Imperator?) which could not be force-fired, but increased in rate of fire the more it fired, so at first it was rather slow to repel attackers, but if they was slow or large in number then it would get up to speed and start chewing through them, and be ready for a second wave if it wasnt too far behind.

Having a few higher tech level units with non-constant rates of fire or even burst/volley sizes certainly makes those epic clashes more interesting and fun.

As others have mentioned, TA did the same thing with resources. If you had too many Berthas firing, your energy went to zero in a hurry. So from that point of view, overheating makes sense. I do wonder though, if using resources such as energy, like TA did, is sufficient to get the same game play effect. In some sense what you are suggesting is a weapon that has it's own private energy capacitor that had to charge to full before it can cut loose.

That's a little different from a weapon that has a slow firing rate because the slow firing weapon is guaranteed to shoot eventually. One that has a private energy capacitor still needs energy from your system and so would be shut down by a concerted attack on the fusion reactors. It's also different from the Berthas in TA because Berthas would stop firing if your energy went to zero. These guns, on the other hand, would charge their capacitors whenever they could get energy and be ready to cut loose when they eventually got filled.

Overall, I like it.

PS: And if GPG is reading, please sign me up for the beta! I live close to the Kirkland office, so I'd love to come and pick it up in person