This probably goes more in balance as its a multi faceted issue..

Resource income sources

Mines 
pro- its like an infomercial at 1am. Set it and forget it...
con- ROI of resources invested to mine paying it back is HORRIBLE

Pirates
pro- easy, consistent income, good ROI of time invested
con- its a computer, its boring. you can engage any player of any size disparity

Resource theft of others
pro- its fun having player-player interaction
con- loot penalty, poor roi of time spent finding targets/fuel to get to them

Debris Hunting
pro-Big amounts of resources in 1 go
con- if player is active risk of getting caught. mostly encourages players going for others significantly smaller than themselves to optimize profits


I think this can be balanced out some without really making anyone angry..

if you were to improve the ROI of mines (more resources produced per resources invested) you'd have more people building mines, you'd have more resources available on the server, you'd also have more players attacking other players to steal resources.
Loot penalty, personally i think the loot penalty kicks in too early, as well as is too severe. I understand restricting it for specific reasons... but perhaps a better option would be to make it so 1 player can only steal X amount from a single player per amount of time. 

If these 2 items (mine roi and loot penalty) were tweaked... you'd really encourage more player/player interaction outside big players hunting tiny players in their point range fleets or inactive fleet hunting.


You'd make pirate hunters happy by not reducing their income
you'd make miners happy by increasing their income
you'd make active hunting players happy by having more resources able to be looted.


just food for thought...

Think it would be nice to have +1 research slot queue.

Where if you have enough resources on planet at the time of the first research completing it will start the next research.

Yes this means you would have to leave the resources on the planet for this to work, otherwise it would work as normal. 

I think this has the benefit of allowing someone to optimize research time

It also has the risk of being raided for the resources if you are being lazy

It works be nice you have a view similar to imperium/expand imperium where..

You can access all construction/unit building etc.. Without having to go to each planet individually to start building

It would be nice to have a in combat command option to make them use their special abilities instead of leaving them using it to chance

there is a mission 12. It randomly occurs at your planet.

1. go to over view
2. hold left or right click over the ship, you will slowly approach it.. eventually you'll "enter the ship"
3. they'll ask for some silly amount of resources to hire Telepathist for 1 month. if you look at res value in HC on beastiary...you're better off just selling res and buying him for real.

after activating the res payment, you have 3 days to comply or it leaves

Does anyone else feel that the Raids level requirement either progresses too slowly or that the level requirement to unlock the ship movement speed research is too high?

At what progression is it normally expected for people to unlock this? 

I guess theres always the solution of just burning vespene to burn vespene...but thats pretty stupid to push new players into literally burning vespene just to unlock speed research

Hey you guys, lets go fly around the system 1,000 times with no purpose other than to watch vespene burn...?

Its not always unknown, you must have high espionage level vs theirs to ever get that info.
Problem is say you're espionage 13, that means if you succeed you can see their activity within the last 13 hours.
If their last activity was 14hours ago, you have no idea of knowing, you are also not told that normally you would receive this information but that they were active outside your detection window

If you spy and your espionage level vs theirs is not great enough it says "unknown" for recent activity

If you spy and your espionage level vs theirs is great enough it will say the server time they were last active within x amount of hours (where x = your espionage level)


------
If you spy someone and your espionage level vs theirs is great enough to attain this information, but their last activity is beyond the range of X, it says "unknown"

it would be nice if this displayed last activity greater than X. Or some indication that normally you would of ascertained this information but their activity time cannot be displayed.

Well I can understand this. Basically if you're fleet is such much smaller and dies while dealing 0 damage it auto generates it. This reduces server load.

Game play wise it makes sense as I'm sure some of you have killed pirates or something with such overwhelming force your first volley kills everything at a range greater than the enemy ships so that they don't even return fire.

Gameplay wise, this prevents people from skipping espionage tech and just spy/probing am enemy with 1 unit. Ie, fighter, scourge, etc. To get full fleet information from combat report (fleet numbers. Upgrades, etc) when normally their spies would not be capable of it or would require a significant amount of spies being sacrificed which are not cheap relative to 1 combat ship

Think some nice changes to FAS would be...

1. having a value field where you could type in the desired number of a unit to be under FAS
2. If #1 is too hard, a toggle on/off switch next to each unit type if you wish for it to be covered under FAS or not

Open 2 different browsers, problem solved

Example: explorer, fire fox, Google chrome, etc

They are over the top.. Too excessive

Hello,

it would be nice if from mobile device you could control combat, not just view.

Perhaps long press a point/target for move/attack?