Drat, this sounds to me to be as balance-damaging as the fighter-stack bug that was in the previous revision of the game. Just toss in a diVersionary 5000-point intelligence operation on the same turn that your PPP or other big project completes, and there's no way to defend against it? It's like a covert-operations Version of MAD, as soon as two empires go to war they'll ground-contaminate each others' planets back into the stone age.
