[Q]

One more small oddity in ground combat:
Small shield depleters do normal damage and are therefore extremely powerful!

However this can be easily corrected if you allow small shield depleters only for fighters and no more for troops.

I got an e-mail for MM, that they will take care of the shield bug in troops.
I made some more tests to see what would happen if the shields work and the result is as expected, that attacking troops get extremely powerful against the militia. To compensate this I increased the militia per population by 2x, the attack strength of the militia by 2.5x and the damage resistance of the militia by 3.3x. In this setting 300kT large troops can still conquer a colony with 300M population, but about half of the attacking troops are lost in that combat.