Hey - long time since I posted here last! Lots has changed by the looks of things.
I have been playing the current version of the game over the weekend, and thought I'd let you know what I think. Firstly, it looks and feels great - you've certainly captured the essence of the original and updated and generally improved on it, so well done there. Looks like there are enough people playing that my observations have probably been noted before, but I'll just drop them in here anyway...
Something seems to be causing the game to freeze when starting a new turn. [oh, that seems to be to do with issuing the same orders to two fleets in one turn... ok]
A minor thing, but Mars and Venus are the wrong way around, size-wise. Mars is currently about the size of the Earth and Venus much smaller, when of course in real life it is the other way around.
I noticed that you can re-name ships - nice feature (are ships going to be receiving names automatically in the future?); unfortunately it seems the names are lost at the start of the next turn.
Another thing to do with the naming - it isn't quite obvious how to make the name stick even for the turn you are on... seems after you type the name in you need to deselect the ship but stay in redeploy mode - not very intuitive. A little 'Accept' button alongside the name field would be a much more positive way of handling it, I think.
There's a weird bug in the diplomacy section whereby in the inbox, only some of the messages display. It seems ok if you only have one in there, but if there are several, they sometimes just give you a blank screen (ie the message panel) when you select them.
I can declare war, but it doesn't seem to survive the turn change...
Also, I notice that at the moment, all planets that can be inhabited start out as being habitable. I hope it isn't planned to keep it this way, as terraforming a world was a significant strategic element of the original, requiring you to keep your colony ships protected for longer periods of time. A suggestion on that front: perhaps as a bit of an improvement over the original, why not have it so that the colony ship is capable of only terraforming a world to a basic level of habitability (still requiring several turns), and then requiring you to build some terraforming structure that completes the process over X turns (20 perhaps), gradually increasing the max pop. level of the planet to its true maximum. It always seemed a bit odd to me that you could effectively terraform an entire world from orbit, to the best it could possibly be, within 3 or 4 turns
It would also serve to slow down the development of systems somewhat - and given the number that there will be on the larger maps, I think that is absolutely essential.I've seen the combat demo videos and have to say it certainly looks extremely good, so I'm looking forward to trying that out for myself
All in all I think you're on to a winner with this one - keep up the good work 
