I understand what Pbhead and MindsEye are saying here, and I agree, and was trying to suggest a similar solution in my number 4.   'Lock' the cursor to its location, and have the empire tree expand away from it in both direction.  If you will, call it another type of 'zoom to cursor'.

I've spent some more time thinking about, and watching the empire tree jumping; analyzing the problem.  The jumping stems from ships leaving one planet to go to another.  As ships leave one planet, the tree contracts there, while growing in the "in transit" icon, then later contracting there, while the destination planet's tree expands.  If the "in transit" icon was placed in between the two planets on the empire tree, they all would remain largely stable as one area absorbs the changes of the other.  But that would require "in transit" areas between all planets, and would be further complicated when multiple planets are listed.  So I don't see an easy complete solution to the problem.  (Other than entirely eliminating "in transit" - not representing travel in phase space at all, and show departures or arrivals only when ships are halfway thru the jump, or halfway thru phase lanes).

I have one more suggestion that I think will help, and possibly also greatly enhance the empire tree:

6. A Hybrid Collapse, or a third intermediate stage collapse/expand, between the existing stages.  Which would allow more ships to displayed in each row, yet be also functional.  Combine the elements of the two current stages.  For Example: show 3 ship icons, then a group of dots to represent the remaining ship of that class.  Followed by 3 ships and dots of the next type of ship, etc.. 

This would greatly reduce the number of lines needed to display all ships, therefore reducing jumping, with the additional benefit of showing more planets on one screen!  Less row changes means less jumping. 

I have another seperate issue I'd like to address:  In the map mode, if you double click on a planet to select and/or center it, it jumps away from the mouse cursor.  Meaning you have to refind the planet to actually give it instructions.  (LOL, another jumping issue).

It would be much more intuitive if you could 'lock' the cursor to doubleclicked map selections.

I hope this makes sense.

As an aside, I also have been experiencing significantly more lag in the 1.2 lobby online.  And games also seem slower, or laggy.

       Scale ships down or make wells much bigger. increase weapon range all around.

Ships sitting still firing at each other is SO 2008.

They are two separate pet pevs of mine. 1 ,2.

Well, tbh I think it would be too much work at this point to change this and have it actually look and feel good. They've added the moddable option in every ship entity to make them use fighter physics. Anyone can turn it on in 5 minutes for every ship and see how good it looks when you have 2 maxed out fleets (it won't be pretty).

By 'pretty' I meant watching ships bounce into each other while trying to fly around and fight, not really weapon effects It's one of those high-effort, low-payout things. They'd need to do a lot of work to make it work and play right, and in the end it's just an aesthetic change. 

But hey, if these new corvettes are sufficiently small, I could maybe see doing it on them so you'd just have one ship class zipping around and it wouldn't be a big mess with maxed out fleets.

I haven't seen anyone mention this.  Could we get a fix to end "combat auto-jumping" by units that have been ordered to attack an enemy ship that then phase jumps to another gravity well?  It's so annoying to watch your ships auto-jump after an enemy frigate only to jump on top of an enemy starbase and get destroyed when that's not what you wanted them to do and when you never issued a jump order.

Im second guessing myself right now.... but I dont think theres post game stats for most of the new things in the 2 expansions. like starbases and envoys and diplomacy points. Also, it'd be nice to track these stats over several games.

I could go for the phase jump thing if it was only triggered on enemy capital ships in range trying to jump away, maybe carriers too.  But I certainly wouldn't want to see it stopping a Cobalt or something like that.  The cost in antimatter is too expensive to use on cheap ships. 

The level 6 abilities are not set to auto-cast at all unless you tell them to.  But the option should still be there for those that want it.

And why wouldn't it be worth the developers doing a copy-paste job for the flak to have the explore option?  The AI can already invoke this option for all of their ships.  The only change would be adding the button on the interface for flak so that they could auto-explore like scouts.  Regular scouts are a joke when it comes to scouting later in the game ebcause strikecraft tear them to shreds in seconds.  It isn't like this isn't in the scope of simple side things to look at in spare moments while developing Rebellion. 

I am aware of that.  That wasn't the point I was making.  Goafan77 suggested that level 6 abilities shouldn't be auto-casted at all.  I was responding to his statement, specifically the part about 'shouldn't'.  That is all. 

So, if your target is phase jumping you've probably won the battle and will either have a few moments to recover the antimatter, or you'll pursue the enemy fleet and have that antimatter wasted by the jump. So you'll still lose the antimatter, you just get another destroyed cobalt for free (and even if you feel otherwise, its not that hard to keep your caps focused on more expensive targets).

I didn't say that. I leave finest hour on autocast all the time. I was just saying that of all the abilities they could improve autocast for Missile Barrage should probably be at the bottom of the list because virtually everyone manually uses this particular ability.

Already confirmed they aren't going to do this. At best they'll make the pathfinding a bit better so that they don't collide with stationary objects as much.

Please change newly constructed guardian preset commands. 

Guardians should not auto-cast their damage absorb ability and waste all their antimatter.  Guardians should not be set to auto attack, as their main purpose is defensive.  I have not won a battle yet due to their incredible attack capabilities (although i've been thinking about trying a guardian spam fleet with progens...i want to see how strong that will be)

Repulse should work when it put on autocast, a recast the moment it has expired is needed to avoid needless micromanagement. 

I find myself constantly having to change these preset commands.  guardians protect, they don't need to go blasting things with their weak lasers, and wasting their antimatter pools for no reason.

Overall, I see the developers increasing the usefulness of unit abilities and thereby increasing the depth of the fleet combat.  Please keep expanding the strategic and tactical options that players have at their disposal.