THANK YOU for addressing the pre-loading issue, it is greatly appreciated. If be fine if the AI didn't use Assault Marines, or maybe just had a simple rule of thumb like 'build every third Assault Cruiser with Assault Marines instead'.

-Will

Yea I wouldn't want to loose Hovertanks or Battlemechs, that would make taking planets cost prohibitive. Maybe as a feature suggestion when you queue up a ship and have multiple options for the loadout you could get a pop up asking which troop type you wanted to build with it? Currently this would ...

Playing a Terran game and finding and I'd much rather have my Assault Cruisers carry Assault Marines than Tanks so I can more easily board enemy ships and steal their sweet tech. Is there a way to make this the default rather than building them separately?

-Will

Yes, I'd agree on the point about transports; unless you're dealing with tanks and you have Battlemechs you often need 8-12 transports to deal with even a moderately defended planet once the enemy gets Militia tech, and the constant cycling of transports back to fill up on fresh troops means you ...

So I've only got one partially completed test game in (which I'll upload when it's done), but overall I think the changes seem good. My fleet is only a little smaller than I would typically field at this stage in the game but it has also forced me to develop the finance techs and build markets to ...

1. Ship spinning
Done for shield capacity and regen rate optimisation. Shields are generally still OP, and this method still works especially for small ship and larger ones if they lack mounts with forward fire archs (Tinker ships)
Workaround: there is a mod for regen fix from Harpy Eagle which ...

Just ran into what looks to be a minor bug. If you run into a situation where you have multiple competing colonization attempts and you get the hail asking you to not colonize the system, you can just colonize the planet you want first and then answer the hails and promise to NOT colonize the system ...

Cool that I found a bug, glad I reported it. Issue on the Militia makes total sense, another good reason to keep morale up!

-Will

I just checked and the outpost looks like a standard fuel outpost. Anyway, game is upload, game_7130 . Let me know what you find!

-Will

Haven't played in awhile, but noticed two odd things, wondering they are just new behavior or if I should upload the game for a closer look.

1) Noticed that the Orthin had an arid world (which they stole from me) that had a small (1 mil) population of Spice Mongers on it when I retook it. However ...

However, 'consequence free bombing' probably won't be a feature forever; I believe the intent is once a better Terraforming model gets implemented that too much bombing can lead to environmental degradation.

-Will

Oh this all sounds extremely promising; I will try to fire up a game today and see if I have any useful feedback.

-Will

In general I think we need some quality of life improvements around multiple factions; right now it's definitely weird to have two or more of a given faction with the same name, same logo, same leader name, etc, etc. They definitely need some way to differentiate them better.

-Will

While I would caution against assigning races to arbitrary 'good' or 'evil' alignments, I do agree that being a consistently bad actor (excessive planetary bombardment, buying slaves, etc) should count for something in diplomacy.

-Will

So, first off I'll preface by saying I agree with zolobolo that this is mostly a feature, not a bug; it keeps small ships relevant well into the late game, whereas in most 4X games they are totally obsolete.

However, PD weapons really do work against pretty well against missiles, the problem is ...