- Bug: Projection of how many turns out a tile is takes into account the move speed of the ship, but not its moves remaining.
- Bug: Pathfinding can lead ships outside of your range. For example, a ship can leave your range to go around space dust.
- The planetary projects "economic stimulus" and "research project" are strategically the same choice as shifting the planetary production focus toward credits or research, but produce quantitatively different outcomes (in my experience, significantly worse results for the projects, though I suspect the current values are placeholders). This means that there are two ways to achieve the same notional outcome, and one is often far better than the other, which is both strategic collapse and prone to micromanagement if there are ever cases where the other option is better. This can be avoided without losing the UI convenience of those projects; I would suggest making them produce exactly the same outcome that you would get from diverting the production segment of the planetary production focus into economy or research. That way, you still have a convenient short-term way of reallocating hammers into test tubes, without the need to worry about which of the two methods is more efficent. Other possible resolutions to this issue surely exist.
- The nebula and dust cloud terrain types mostly seemed to get in my way, rather than granting a sense of place and interest to the world. It seems like the terrain types lack a key feature: That you sometimes WANT to be in it. Nebulae could be adjusted to make it more useful for hiding ships in enemy territory, dust or similar could be adjusted to make for a great place to place defensive ships or stations, things like that. In land-based 4x games, terrain can work for or against you -- that's part of what makes it so interesting.
- The background is beautiful, but understates the vastness, beauty, and terror of space. Consider giving that background nebula graphic "near infinite distance" by making it not zoom when the camera zooms and barely pan when the camera pans. I would also put a little more density and depth to the starfield between it and the play space, with a fair number of stars just *barely* moving as you pan about the map. I agree the background doesn't want to be distracting, but I believe you can make your existing assets convey a far more grand sense of of the depth and beauty of space, just by playing with how you're doing the parallax zooming and scrolling.
- I think the dust clouds and nebulae, while very visually distinctive, are unfortunately quite ugly. There are a lot of beautiful artistic takes on cosmic phenomena out there; with so many references, I bet your artists can find a way to keep those areas clean and distinctive for gameplay without quite reducing them to the cotton candy puffs they resemble in the alpha.
