Before anyone asks, it's not yet available as an opt-in at the time of this comment.  I just checked.  We'll have to wait until Derek adds informaiton about how to get the opt-in.  Hopefully, we can wait patiently.

There are good changes there.  Will there be more?  There are some important bugs that have existed for too long that really need to be fixed.  I regularly compile and report a list of problems that concern me.  Here is my latest list.

Even if few or none of them get fixed, I'll keep playing.  It's too hard to break the habit.

How open are you guys to UI improvements?

Its a lot of work to upgrade ships in a fleet, especially a fleet composed of smaller hulls. You have to select them one at a time, give them the order to upgrade, find the ship in a list you want them to upgrade to, repeat until all units are upgrading, then wait until all the upgrading is complete, then select them all again so you can order them to join a fleet. Its quite chore if you have 40 or more tiny hulls in a fleet that need upgrading.

Ctrl + a: Select all. It would make it much easier to select upgraded ships so you can make them join a fleet.

Hold Shift: Currently, this works like hold Ctrl (will allow to select multiple ships one at a time). Instead, it should allow you select 2 ships, and then the program will add all ships in between the 2 ships you selected to your selection.

Upgrade all ships in a fleet: Some times you only want to upgrade a fleet or two. Or maybe you can only afford to upgrade one or two fleets. There should be a way to focus the upgrade so it only applies to a fleet, and then maybe only to the point where you can afford it.

Keep ships in a fleet when upgrading: In GalCiv 2, ships that were upgrading were still kept in a fleet. They had only 1 hp and couldn't move until they were finished upgrading. Duplicating this would remove the need to select all upgraded ships so you could put them back into their fleet.

We are planning to Optin later today.

I love your bug lists, thank you for putting it together.

I would love that! I try to go through the issues on the forums but honestly lists like Old Spiders are super helpful for being able to go through on a fix pass.

Lol. You have no idea how hard that issue was to fix, you are going to make our developers cry. The issue was a deep math problem where the worldspace coordinates would be slightly different and cause the screenspace coordinates to be placed slightly off frame to frame. Its sounds so minor, but it took a really big hammer to fix.

I'm not using mods while testing this opt-in, but I have one that makes changes to some of the improvements, and this opt-in also makes changes to some of the improvements.

I decided to make sure my mod had all the changes in this version and found 23 improvements in this version that had the <IsIndestructible>true</IsIndestructible> tag in the ImprovementDefs file but did not have the Can not be destroyed text in the ImprovementText file.  The information for these improvements contradict each other.  I was only checking the ones for Retribution.  I have no idea what the Crusade and base versions have.

Here are the names of the improvements in the order in which they appear in the files.  The names shown are names that are the same in both files to make searching for them easier.  I have broken the list into groups of 5.

Brindlesobservatory
DimensionalObservatory
KimbreysRefuge
Bank_Name
BankingSector

MegaResort
KrynniacSanctuary
HyperionMatrix
NavigationCenter
GalacticNavigationNetwork

GalacticNavigatorsGuild
WeatherControlCenter
WeatherControlZenith
TempleofValor
AntimatterPowerPlant

AquaticBiospheres1
AquaticBiospheres2
AquaticBiospheres3
MonumentResistance
MonumentApproval

MonumentSoldiering
MonumentProduction
MonumentGlobal

An extra possible problem I found is that a City has both pieces of information indicating it is not destructible, but a Silicon City has none, which indicates it can be destroyed.  Is there a reason why one cannot be destroyed and the other can?

At minimum the Yor should be given the ability to destroy cities. I agree that everyone should be able to do so, though.

Overloading a planet past its maximum population is already possible by shuttling people with colony ships. Any time a planet is over population cap, people start leaving/dying and the population goes down. I don't see the possibility of destroying cities as a serious way to exploit this versus shuttling people with colony ships.

It gets even worse when you invade planets belonging to synthetic civs such as the Yor. The Yor may increase their population all the to way to the max allowed by the planet quality without needing to use cities. This means that any planets taken from the Yor might see their populations decrease over time unless you quickly build cities to support the population.

I don't know if it's my imagination but turns seem to be going by much faster than in the past. That's a good thing. 

Is the AI more aggressive in this version? It seems that way.

On the downside, the turn information on the left is still disappearing.

Thanks, SD, for all your work,

Richard

Is this thread a better place to report issues? I have made 3 different threads in the support section, and I have no idea if those issues have been acknowledged.