2 hours into entrenchment as TEC against a vasari, 1 TEC, and 1 Advent, and i'm having a blast. Build order/fleet construction/tech acquisition is all different now b/c of the defensive technologies. I was very surprised when I attacked the vasari homeworld, only to find the fleet I was beating on was getting help from a vasari starbase rushing at my fleet. That was interesting. I fell back to the adjacent planet, which had a starbase of my own, rebuilt some escorts and repaired some ships, and jumped back in during a simulateous pirate raid. I nailed the starbase and the pirates distracted the rest of the defenses and enemy fleet, allowing me to defeat in detail.

Early defensive structure build is a single hangar bay with flak upgrade near a small cluster of gauss platforms with rocket upgrades. I feel pretty good about sortie-ing my fleet, comfortable with my defense in the early game.

So far so good. A few comments:

mines are broken. They should take 1 or 2 slots each. Probably 1.

should the vasari base move? Interesting if it should. MIght be a defect. In either case, it was very shocking to see a purple spider coming down my screen at my fleet...

Not sure if the constructor is under costed and 10 logicistics is too low. I'm thinking 20 or so, or perhaps a cap put on starbases. For the benefit, I would make the constructor at least as much as a cap ship. The TEC starbase feels about right .Weak at first, and progressively tougher as you upgrade. The enemy starbase was formidable, but not broken. It was in system with 6500 hull and about 3700 shields. Seemed like it was about right.

Overall so far so good. I've only built 4 or 5 of each type of research facility, so I'm not that far into the game. I haven't built/used the new cruiser that's optimized for destroying orbital facilities. More comments to follow.