[arthurtuxedo]

Bugs
1. In the initial research screen, you can deselect all of the initial technologies for a massive headstart, and then still have the technologies you deselected when the game starts. Talk about having your cake and eating it too!

2. Strategic combat seems wonky in general, and produced a lot of crashes that tactical did not.

Design Issues
1. The new ground combat system is very good, but it necessitates a rethinking of troop size and costs. Troops on the ground combat map are like ships, not fighters, and if there are too many of them, things will slow to a crawl. And yet a single medium transport can carry enough troops to literally cover half the map. If they function like ships and not fighters, then they should be treated that way. I suggest inflating the size of troops by a factor of 10, and inflating the cost by a factor of about 3. The way it stands, the best troop transport is an attack ship that's missing one gun and one shield generator to get 2 or 3 cargo bays. Ridiculous.

2. The following defaults need to be changed:

Flag size should default to Small.

Alphasort should default to Off.

Most people will not realize that they can change these settings, at least not right away, so the defaults should be set to the value that will annoy the fewest people.

3. The prices for starting attributes are off. For instance, instead of paying 500 points for +5% construction, a person could pay the same amount for +20% construction by taking the -5% one and the +25% one. I was able to take Ancient Race, Advanced Propulsion, +20% construction, -33% Supply, and Natural Merchants without any significant drawbacks. -5% to something is not significant compared to these advantages. Aaron rightly ditched the min-max paradise known as the sliders, but he's still locked in the slider mentality of small, 5% changes. If an option does not have a large effect on the empire, why even include it?

Comments on the Community
I'm starting to notice some mass hysteria among community members. Yes, the game has bugs. Yes, it has lots of rough edges. Yes, the balance in the stock game is completely terrible. But let's put this in perspective. SE4 was just as bad when it first came out, and it's still very rough and unbalanced after 5 years. I can think of at least one good game that was killed by its own fan community because they got carried away with whining and complaining. The fact is that SE5 does a lot of exciting new things, and compared Stock to Stock against SE4, SE5 is much better.

EDIT:
Diplomacy
I really like the new treaty system, and I'm very much in favor of the idea of non-aggression in neutral systems only, but I feel that the implementation needs to be tweaked some. I had such a treaty with the Terrans in my last game, and they started attacking my planets and colonizers in my own systems even though we were friends and trading partners. This is not right.

If you have such a treaty and you're in someone's system, that should give them the right to attack you but not vice versa! If they decide to let it slide, fine, nothing happens, but the AI should not be instructed to treat your assets in your own system as enemies and seek them out. Also, if combat starts, the invader should only fire if fired on. So if their fleet crosses paths with your colonizer, they don't run it down and blow it to hell. Same for colony worlds.

What would be really nice is to give fleets or ships individual orders as to who and what they will and won't fire on, able to be broken down both by Empire and also by whether a ship has weapons, troops, colony modules, etc. I'm not holding my breath on that one, but most of the stuff above should be doable with some AI tweaks.