First of all I really like the game so far. I havn't participated in Beta 1&2 so maybe some of things were already mentioned, although I searched the formus for similar threads.

Display:

1. Star names: If you check this option the names are displayed directly below the star so the box that shows the number of buildings is gone. If you hover over it with the cursor you still get the information, though. Is this by purpose so it looks better? With the box it is really easy to see which planet is heavily fortified. With the star names on you have to hover of all the planet names.

2. Fighter & Bomber Icons: Its extremely difficult to see which of your wings is a fighter or a bomber wing. Is it possible to make the icons more distinguishable. if the gravity well is cluttered with ships they also look like a formation of ships to me.
Another way to display them might be a wedge shaped formation of several small dots (fighters) and diamonds (bombers)

3. The pop-up windows for the detailed income of a resource are too long to display in large games and at the moment the window shifts up so you can't even see the most important resource per second value.

Research:

4. Superior Research Droids: It states that gives bonus to the repair building but doesn't say somethin about the Hoshiko. That is misleading, as the tech button and the Hoshiko ability button use the same picture and the tech by itself is a bit weak.
I know that the Hoshiko is available later in the tech tree but the repair droids tech just makes the droids used better which should also affect every use of it.

Ship movement:

5. The option to let all ships jump at the same time is veray nice but with large fleets it usually lasts a looong time to phase jump. They seem to wait in formation forever. Its faster to let them move near the jump route and retrieve the fighters on the way, then jump individually. The ships jump more or less at the same time and on a sidenote it looks amazing when the arrive in a stream of ships.
Maybe the ships can jump in a more loose formation so they don't have to maneuver for minutes.

6. Another reason for delays are fighters. Some fighters still hunt down enemies on the other side of the system while others are docking for the jump. I think this happens when you select a fleet via group hotkey and some of the fighters are also selected with the group. So I press 1 give a jump order and the fighters that are selected do silly stuff.

Diplomacy:

I guess this is still in the works so I keep it short:

7. Its quite painful to give your teammate alot of resources at once at the moment. You have to click 30 times just to transfer 1000 of each which is not even much in the lategame.

8. Research Alliance: I missed something like this. As the races would have different tech trees (I guess) tech sharing isn't possible and that is good news for me.
A suggestion would be give players a tech cost discount for each research alliance.

New stuff:

9. I think a tech for faster ship movement (for all ships) would really speed up the gameplay at the end. It can be fairly high on the tech tree so its only available in the late game or in large games where it would really speed things up.
It would also add more strategy to the game. One player can tech up fast to make his ships faster so he can outrun or raid his enemies on a regular basis until they catch up.

10. I would apprenciate an "accelerated start" option for skirmish and multiplayer games. You will begin the game with more resources, ships, techs (all level 1 ones?) and planets.
If this is too difficult or time consuming an option to start with more resources would help, too.

11. With waypoints set to different planets or even systems there is a lot of jumping involved and you get many messages from the ship captains jumping. As many others I really like them but it would be cool to have a different set of messages every time a group of ships jumps together. This helps to figure out if your fleet already jumped while doing other stuff.
So whenever you select ships via a hotkey or manually and give them a simultaneous jump order you will hear something like: "Standby, fleet prepares for phase jump!" or "All ships jump on my mark! 3..2..1 JUMP!" instead of the regular messages. This would add information to the sound which has to be gathered visually otherwise.

12. Another sound information piece would be capital ship messages. When in battle or busy with something else its quite difficult to follow the message alerts. Sounds like: "We lost our shields, Sir" or "All men leave the ship" (instead of the rather dull "we lost a captal") add atmosphere to the game and emphasize the capitals even more while - again - shifting information from visual to sound.


Thats it so far. Keep the good work up!
Hope you can understand everything as english is not my mother tongue.