As already stated, this isn't a return to the three FTL systems of old, having players play with three different FTL system is impossible to properly balance, so Hyperlanes being the standard mode of FTL transportation is what makes the most sense, however there wasn't any need to entirely remove the other systems from the game, or lock them behind late game tech options and doing so was a mistake, they should be situational tools available to everyone from the start.
Day one Gateways and Jump Drives would totally work if there are proper penalties tied to them, Jump Drives ALREADY have penalties on them so you just scale them up at level one warp drives and keep lowering them until you reach the current penalties for jump drives.
Jump Drives: 200 day cooldown, 50% reduction to damage and sublight speed while the cooldown is in effect.
Warp Drive III: 400 day cooldown, 50% reduction to damage and sublight speed while cooldown is in effect, also ships take 30% damage to their Hull, 25% damage to their armor and 50% damage to their shields after its use.
Warp Drive II: 550 day cooldown, 60% reduction to damage and sublight speed while cooldown is in effect, also ships take 45% damage to their Hull, 50% damage to their armor and 100% shield damage after its use.
Warp Drive I (starting tech): 700 day cooldown, 70% reduction to damage and sublight speed while cooldown is in effect, also ships take 60% damage to their Hull, 100% damage to their armor and 100% shield damage after its use.
This increases the number of strategic options that can be used during certain situations (being boxed in by civilizations that close borders by default) but carries penalties heavy enough that people won't use them without reason. Right now all you need to protect your borders against other players in an early game is a sufficiently upgraded Bastion starbase and a small fleet to serve as bait to "catch" enemy fleets that try to bypass the Bastion by staying in the outskirts of the star system.
Warp Drives allowing fleets to bypass choke points makes star lane detection range be actually important because detecting a hostile fleet warp jump means you have a lot of time to kill them and discourages people from leaving large system holes inside their territory. By that same metric using warp jumps to get a better attack angle on an enemy is a huge gamble because your fleet is going to be significantly weaker and could be easily destroyed by much weaker fleets.
This also means that since the option exists from the very beginning players will have more experience dealing with the tactic, also its better for flavor as the jump drive technology doesn't come out of the blue. The same would apply to the Gateway technology group.
Activated Gate network: would be the final tech level for the gateways and would be how the gates work at this moment, IE you can go from one gateway to any other gateway in the network either owned by you or one of your allies.
Earlier iterations of this tech would increase the range and reduce the penalties tied to emergency FTL jumps during a retreat and also would control WHERE the ships would be retreating to IE to the closest Experimental gateway station, this also means that the Jump Gate technology has better flavor as you are developing the technology as your civilization advances, not just unlocking a new FTL method out of the blue, or having your ships have ridiculous emergency escape FTL capabilities that they don't have in any other situation.
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