[Paul1980au]

The idea of a few turns to fully kill off the population is a good idea - how about a intel project plant plague bomb - which would kill a % of people on a planet - would be cured next turn but could be used to weaken enemy planets and also with such a intel project a flexible amount of resources to put towards a project such as said above

Say 5000 intel points might be enough to kill 50M pop
10000 intel pnts say 100M pop
ANd rising steadily to say 200000 pop which would be enough to wipe out a large planet of say 2B population

Just some additional ideas to play with

The idea of progressing levels of scanner and extended range is a good idea. Some new components could reduce enemy scanning in a sector - sort of like increasin scanner tech vs increasing levels of anti scanner tech.