OK I've been playing the game for a little while and I have some ideas/impressons, that while they aren't strictly necessary would be nice to have (In my eyes anyway)

1. An auto-scout option for the scouts, this would make early game a lot less painful for me as I hate having to say "Now DON'T ATTACK THAT GROUP OF 15 PIRATES YOU STUPID DAMN IDIOT SCOUT ZOOM OFF TO THE NEXT PLANET DAMMIT!" Yeah, I seem to loose allot of scouts that way. Maybe you set it on auto scout and set it in a general direction and it discovers planets etc for you, without engaging the pirates.

2. The pirates are a much greater threat to me than the other AI's (I should probably shift the slider to hard right?) at the moment. It took me a while to figure out that you cant leave any unoccupied planets behind your lines else you'll have a buttload of pirates mauling you capitol planet in no time. This can be a bit annoying, once you have some front lines up you don't expect to get reamed from behind by damned pirates. Even so, the strength of the pirates does do what its meant to do early game, slow down player (by player I refer to the AI players too) expansion. To be honest I would skip the dead asteroids altogether if It wasn't for the fact that I know the pirates will spawn there if I don't develop the sector.

3. The structure of how the economy works seems to be once your ahead you stay ahead in terms of research etc. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but once I had the "Earn 10% of every purchase the enemy makes" research, I had many, many multiples the income of the other guys on the map (I know this because I had intelligence pacts with them all at one point or another MaybeI'm as backstabby as the old AI? ). In fact the only thing that limited the size of my fleet was the ship cap, which in my opinion is a wee bit low.
The black market is really necessary for the crystal, at the moment its the bottleneck resource.

4. Producing units is a grind, you have to keep going back to planets and make new orders when you get more resources, this is the old way. The new way is that you set up a build Que and set it on auto-repeat.(Guess where that was stolen from )Personally I think this is a vastly better way of dealing with unit production (With the ability to switch off the Que if your running low on resources obviously).

5. Another thing that would be nice would be if you were able to "Partial invest" in a research or a unit, IE, you put some money in now and the unit / research is completed to the level at which you could pay at the time. This could combine with the above suggestion with obvious implications on how the economy is structured.

6. Also the skybox is coming up orange, with lots of reflections of the ships, is it meant to look like that?(because its really annoying) Another technical issue I have is that the game crashes every so often when I start it. (I have well in excess of the minimum / recommended system requirements.)

7. At the moment controlling the units themselves can be a wee bit unwieldy, the icons all fall over the top of each other and making distinctions between them is hard. (Its been said before I know..) Another thing is that I keep zooming into black space accidentally, which ill probably stop doing eventually and Idon't really know what you can do about
Being able to target enemy units while they are in transit to your sector would be cool too. As of right now I'm just moving my units close to the point where they phase in

8. Can we have damage tables, pretty please?

9. I love the panels in the bottom right corner of the screen by the way, it just makes it so much easier to keep track of everything. Maybe an option to have more of them? 8 instead of 4?

10. I want to be able to capture buildings! really really badly. I assume you guys just haven't put this in yet, right? It seems such a waste to capture a planet then have to smash all the stuff around it before you can build your own. Why not just commandeer their stuff?


That's about it for now until I get better at the combat aspect and can tell you what I think of the balance