Well, I can imagine that for the less experienced, the problem will now be the jump between normal and hard...
I think normal is fine where it is at right now...honestly, I think the current hard should actually be unfair, with hard being somewhere between the current normal and current hard...
So those who like the current hard would end up playing on the new unfair, those that want to move beyond normal would play the new hard so the jump in difficulty isn't too high...
Hopefully that makes sense....
QFT. Normal is fine for newb players, but Hard is new Unfair now i guess. The difference between these 2 difficulty levels is now brutal. I was literally steamrolled today, it was shortly after the beginning of the game, when i ran into AI 2 jumps from my capital , who had about 2x as many ships as i hadm on top with 2 capships (already at lvl 3 or 4). From that point, it was basically lost cause.
On another note, this forum is broken for Opera, on occasion i cant use Bold, it leaves horrible empty place at the end of each post almost every time....its terribly annoying. Seems to work fine in Chrome, but i would prefer to stick to Opera. Please fix this, if you can.