Guys, guys, Endless Space 2 is in Early Access! <insert-high-pitched-squeal-here>

...but seriously, I'm loving this game to death. So much so that I'm breaking my usual "silently lurk" approach, and writing a post! I've played two games now. In the first I had the misfortune of being the Sophons who started next to the Cravers (things did not go well for me). In the second I had the good fortune of being the Cravers who started next to the Sophons (things did not go well for them). With only about six hours in the game, I'm certainly still learning a whole lot as I go, but I think I've seen enough things that I can add a few discussion points. I've divided this post into three categories of observations: "Bugs" (things I think are behaving improperly), "Questions" (items that weren't made entirely clear to me by the games I've played), and "Wishes" (things that I feel would benefit the game, and I hope will spark conversation).

Bugs

1. In the second game I played, the central constellation (in a galaxy with two arms) was discovered by "LesserEmpire#0"
2. As the Cravers, declaring wars on multiple minor civilizations does not count as multiple wars for the Happiness boost
3. It's possible to hire the same Hero multiple times (my Craver empire had two of Fusha Keencrest)
4. The quest "Of Our Own Blood" part 2 appears to be bugged. I retrieved the ship and brought it to my home world, but the step never completed. I experimented with trying to dock it, adding a general, and putting the ship into guard/sleep, but nothing worked (it spent the entire game just sitting in orbit around my home planet)
5. Sleeping a fleet causes it to drop out of Guard after a turn, but if you don't sleep it, it still shows up as a fleet in need of orders
6. Merging fleets has the potential of unassigning your Hero on board. I merged two fleets (on with a Hero, one without), and the resulting fleet was the one without the Hero. I spent the rest of the game carefully shuffling ships between fleets by hand
7. Received a message when the academy was first found that it was discovered by "$empire", or some similar variable being parsed as a string.

Questions

1. Is there a way to "raze" a system? I spent significant time searching for a 'Salt the Earth" type option in my Cravers game, because our expansions became so extreme that I couldn't afford keep fighting. Every planet I captured would knock more systems into rebellion. I had to spend the last 50 turns just defending my borders.
2. How are "forced truces" triggered?
3. Is it accurate to assume that Luxury Resources won't appear in starting constellations?
4. How does one reliably find systems that aren't connected to a star path? In this example, the yellow team founded the above system very early in the game, despite being stationed much farther North than this image. Do AIs instantly know when they're around? If so, that seems incredibly advantageous to them. I had a minor heart attack when I saw yellow culture creeping into Imex's space from the great beyond.
5. Is the "<Something" Foams" Tech in the first Era the one that lets you travel between systems without star paths? If so, I question whether this should be so early. It's very difficult for an expansive empire to guard each of its systems as if they're on the borders.
6. Is there any way to tell how close a planet is to flipping over to my color? I've had some planets flip to my color in 10 turns, and others (namely a Lumeri capital) take 40-50.

Wishes

1. I wish I could differentiate between the number of ships orbiting a planet, and the number docked. If I have a fleet of two ships above my home world, and three in its dock, it just shows a five above the planet, even though these are very different in terms of their defenses.
2. I find it hard to tell exactly what effects an individual population unit or a leader are having on a system. If there was some way to indicate the effects of rearranging pops, or unassigning heroes, I would find that extremely helpful. I hate looking at a planet producing a huge number of resources and trying to figure out whether it's more or less efficient than a newly-colonizable planet.
3. I love the aggressiveness of the Cravers. However, I'm concerned that I can give myself major Happiness boosts any time by spontaneously declaring war on someone on the other side of the galaxy. Maybe it's not a problem, but it struck me as exploitative.
4. In the advanced Battle Screen, I wish I could see the projected results of my selected pairings of tactics. "If I select long and he selects short, who is projected to win? What if he selects medium? Etc" The burden should be on the player to determine which strategies will be employed, but maybe the game should tell them what the ramifications of these choices are.
5. At this point, it seems that the "rock paper scissors" dynamic of space combat is much more important than the ships alignment with your selected strategy. I spent my whole game as the Cravers pumping out short range ships to fight short range ships, and I won against absurd odds almost every time by simply selecting my long-range option. My starting-tier ships were beating ones with T1/T2 upgrades. I feel that maybe the RPS element would benefit from being toned back a tad, in favor of ships performing best at their recommended ranges.
6. When an opposing empire is eliminated, I wish the prompt would tell me how/why. As the East Cravers, I spent a whole game competing with the West Cravers for points, until they spontaneously disappeared around turn 80. It turns out they were having the same happiness problems as me, and just conceded, but I didn't find that out until the results screen.
7. I wish there was more explanation regarding how to fill the manpower of ships after they've been used for an invasion. It's taken me a lot of experimentation, and I would really like some way to just drag and drop ground forces from one of my planets to the ships in its hangar.