Hello, Jochen. I'm glad you've discovered Space Empires IV. It's a good game now, but going to get better. Development is continuing even as the CDs are copied for the first commercial sales. There will probably be a "Version 1.1" early next year.
1. No, anything given the "Point-defense" power is not directly controllable by the player. These weapons always target and fire automatically. These are also the only sort of weapon that can target "seekers" (missiles) since you cannot manually target seekers in combat. So it's a good idea to have some point defense weapons on every warship or you will have no defense against missiles but running away.
2. The previous reply is correct. You need to use the "analyze" button to get technologies from captured ships, and of course you won't get any new technologies if the ship doesn't have anything that you don't already have. And, certain technologies cannot be analyzed. The techs that come from "racial traits" like organic manipulation and crystalline technologies cannot be acquired in any way if you don't have the necessary racial trait.
3. The AI has a long standing problem with knowing how to manage its fleets. It is much better than it was in the earlier Versions, but still can make mistakes like that. If you still have the games where this was happening, you ought to send them to
malfador@malfador.com and describe the problem to them. They like to have the saved game to look at. It helps them figure out how to make the AI smarter.
4. This is another problem with the AI, but a trickier one. There are many hidden variables that can affect AI attitude. The way that the AI reacts to you depends on the choices you made in your empire setup as well as some random factors. If they behave REALLY illogically, like declaring war while still feeling "brotherly" then it would be a good idea to send that game to
malfador@malfador.com as well, and describe the problem.
5. There is a printed manual with the game CD, and there will be a much more extensive manual in HTML on the CD. I think it will also be made available on their website so people can browse it.
As I said, the game is still in development even though the first Version is about to ship, so please report any problems you notice to malfador. They are glad to have input, especially bug reports, and are compiling all the feature requests to try to include the most requested features.