Just finished my first game on Normal difficulty, playing a medium sized galaxy with a Custom Sophon variant against three AIs.



Significant Bugs:

• When you/an AI makes an attack with a fleet, then you save and reload, you/them can attack again on the same turn - this bypasses the limit of only being able to attack with a fleet once/turn.
  
  

Small Annoyances:

• After you've seen a tutorial, you can't bring it back up again - if you missed something the first time while you were getting your bearings, you have to look it up online. Seems like it would be better to also have Tutorials as an option in the game menu.
• When reloading, the list of completed constructions/finished techs/events goes away - this can be avoided by saving and reloading right before you'd go to the next turn, but it still seems unnecessary and not to hard to include in a save.
• The Xianhung Cartel(sp?) tech, which says it doubles the FIDS bonuses on resources - does not change the listed bonuses on the resource popups - if a resource is giving me 6 dust/population rather than 3, I want to be able to see it.
  
  

Now onto concerns that deserve some elaboration:



Attacking enemies target unarmed ships when there are armed defenders in orbit:

Each ship has a vision radius that lets it spot incoming enemy vessels, from a logical standpoint, there is no reason unarmed ships wouldn't reposition themselves while the combat ships move to intercept.



From the more important gameplay standpoint, there are several reasons for armed ships to be targeted first - first, if an unarmed ship cannot be protected, then even a minor enemy attack can render it irrelevant - this encourages you to either homogenize your fleets, or count on the AI being stupid. A countermeasure to having to deal with your unarmed ships being hit first is to split them into 1-ship fleets - which just increases busywork.

Another frustration is when non-combat ships auto-join a combat fleet when a fight starts (arrrghh) you have to choose between retreating everything (hope you don't have Death before Dishonor) or losing your noncombat ships - this should not be a problem.



Basically, if you are pushing into enemy territory and their combat fleets cannot stop you, then all this feature does is drag out the game - which does not seem desirable.



Expansion Disapproval Techs are Heavily Backloaded:

My concern is fairly simple - with the way the four techs are organized now, the first two only allow a small degree of extra expansion - the real bonuses are reserved for the endgame. This combines with the fact that you can't decolonize systems to make early-mid-game offenses basically impossible - dragging things out even if you have total military superiority. A more even bonus distribution like -30% --> -55% --> -%70 --> -88% would allow for a more varied early and mid-game.



Feel free to discuss.

After you've seen a tutorial, you can't bring it back up again

You can re-enable tutorial in gameplay tab in options.