Comments and Suggestions on a great game in progress, 240+ hours of playtime

So I've logged about 240 hours playing, loved Endless Space 2 and EN1, and MOO MOO2, but not MOO3 lol, and since this is a alpha version, its pretty amazing, Comments and Suggestions inside.

First, the difficulty the AI doesn't seem to use there ships for any good use untill you set it to impossible. Then they go straight from being dumb to abusing you, a more gradual incremental AI would be great. I would love to play on hard and have the AI actually use their ships, sometimes in a game I'll see 60+ just sitting docked on a planet not doing anything, for which I invade, they are destroyed.

If you could find a way to make the ship classes of different races differentiate a bit, as of right now they are pretty close to identical. I would love to see a special sophon battleship, or a United Empire defense frigate. I know you guys are working on fighters, can't wait to see that in a update.

Also, the last 2 resources in the game, quadrix and the purple one, are very very rare, I'm assuming at a later date they won't be so rare? Also I'm hoping there will be a sixth technology tree, or a expensive way to backtrack a decision on the tree you've made that needs to be corrected.

playing on impossible is great, the game is difficult, and I can't wait to see the other races, I have to ask but is there a update content comming soon? when are you guys shooting to hit Beta?

I recommend playing on one of the slower paced games, to really make each decision you make count, I really enjoy the ability to adjust the pace of a game. 

Multiplayer? Will it exist? I would imagine this is the last thing that would be designed before gold.

Ship Battles!! Great to watch, I would love to be able to set the order of the ships myself, maybe set a attack order, like in endless space 1, single target, multi target, ect. Just add a lot of tweaking and setup to way you want a battle to unfold and space battles will be infinitly better and we defienetly need more battle cards, which I am assuming are comming in a content update. (please correct me if I am wrong.

This is my biggest gripe, its far too easy to take a system over by surprize, and its nearly impossible to increase manpower enough to pose any kind of threat. I am asking that planets and population numbers get balanced in accordance with troops on ships to better estimate what it would take to take over a system. Because right now, Ships > Planets. The tech to build defense on your planet is there, it just doesn't seem to have any impact on the game, this may be related to Alpha, but just throwing it out there. 

Hero ships, if a planet has a hero, he should use his ship to defend it before it comes to the ground battles mentioned above. That is the point of having a hero assigned to a system yes?

For a ALPHA, with content comming, this is a Amazing game, and its relatively light on the errors, rarely do I come into one that requires starting a new game. Keep it up, I would love to see level 6 techs and beyond. if you need to make fewer lvl 5 techs and move some to 6 so you don't need new ideas, that would work too. Also love the marketplace, and how prices change in accordance to demand. All in all very fun, can't wait for the update!

I've always been a huge 5x fan starting with Master of Orion, Master of Orion 2, and NOT Master of Orion 3. The attempts of games like this to do it in real time I have never enjoyed, so grats to keeping to a formula that works, and keep the fun coming, this came is liable to be the next MOO with the right content and Adjustments, and its been 20 years since we've had a true succesor that was any good besides ES1.