I agree, this would definitely let us test more situations and therefor give better feedback.However, I'm already dieing waiting for alpha(P.S. Stardock My birthday is march 3 ) and I cant program very well so dont know exactly whats involved, so id say its a good idea but not to waste too much effort

I'd like to ask for it too however in the form of a trainer more like.  You press the ~ icon and the console pops up.  A command like show_fps could function to show the fps in a situation.  Another command could be spawn_shipname or research_techname (insert ship names or techs) to spawn the ship for testing.  Another option would be to have a hotkey for all research completed.  Spawning planets and stars COULD also be done this way but the alpha testers would need names like they would for the ships.  I am in favor of allowing alpha testers to take advantage of tools in the game BUT when alpha is released and/or the tools are used, DISABLE achievments and in release (assuming you have cheats as a DLC), WARN the user that achievments will be disabled before implementing.  Whatever they decide to release for alpha testers to use, it should come with documentation of what to use in the functions for shipname and if implemented, system formation (that would probably not be a good way to test.  Something like set_planetquality (planet) (x) would be a better way to use it.  Adding a star/system might cause more problems in a alpha leading to a BSOD.

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First I am not sure what language is being used developing the game but I assume C++ and Visual Studio seeing the game will use Direct X 11. There are some tools that I use when I develop programs but those are not very newbie friendly and cost money distributing. Thus the only thing they could do would be to have a game console (as they probably will anyway, atleast in single-play) and add some debug commands to it. Commands to dump the current gamedata to a file, commands to send in crash logs, display gameinfo like fps and so on. The other suggested commands are more like cheatcodes that would be handy to have in the finished single player game.

Sometimes I have major difficulty telling if you're serious or not.

What does playing with a mouse have to do with anything about A dev kit?

I think we have a case of not understanding one another here.  With a game console I meant a command window that opens up where you can type in commands. 

Thanks for the clarification!

I'd love to see cheats for things like revealing the entire map. It's much easier to talk about things like the AI behaving oddly if you can see what it's doing. Cheats to speed up the building and research would make it easier to try things out, but can hinder testing the overall game flow. Still handy for testing certain scenarios. 

Most of your list is pretty good, honestly. The code lines thing wouldn't help us, though, as we don't have code. Their debug tools would make that available to them. 

We can really make use of multiple auto saves being kept, both for reporting single player bugs and to have on hand in case of a MP desync. Those are super hard to troubleshoot without a save that can reproduce it. (Auto saves aren't a silver bullet for that, but they so help.)