it would be nice to know the ground strength of a system at a glance, like you can see in BoFT.
this System has 600 ground troop strength and a max of 4 obrtial batteries, a shield generator, so i need to bring ______ to get the job done. that is a max of 4, not 4 powered.
I have brought 4x troop transports each with two of the 10 attack guys + enough to blow away 2 billion people to a 25 billion minor race planet really early in the game, and bounced....
in the most resent game i have been playing i have wandering around with a massive amount of over kill to avoid the bounce and lose all my ground troops, given the hike back to any where that can build them at a reasonable speed.
i'm all for getting that information being just in the information given when you click a system, sense you seem to be making this game much more... involved... that might just be a tad too much information to give out with out with asking anything in return.
Minor Race status: War
3-5 intel per billion population per turn.
Minor Race status: contact, No Trading, No War, No nothing.
1-2 intel points Per billion population, spread out over 5 turns. 65 billion race drains 13-26 intel points a turn
Minor Race Status: Trade
1 intel point Per billion population, spread out over 10 turns. 65 billion race drains 6.5 intel points a turn
Minor Race Status: Friendship / Co-operation / Affiliation
None, they share this information with you freely
Major Race: Co-operation / Affiliation
None, you are working together aren't you
??? aren't you 
Major Race: Neutral (not shooting, but not Co-operating)
add an option into Espionage to scout Defenses. The message for stopping the attempt: we think someone was trying to gauge our orbital defenses of ______ system, but we ran them off"
The message for failing to stop, if defenders Intel is really bad compared to the attacker, no message. if it is close enough "we think someone was scouting the system defenses of ______. we should strengthen them just to be sure."
Major race: War! (much shooting)
The more you successfully Espionage / Sabotage (normal type) the other side, the more you learn about there planetary defenses the closer the system to your space the more accurate the information. Just not as fast as if you where using the espionage to scout there systems defenses.
and when spying on a major race, give a 5-10% margin of error. we see they have 90 ground strength, but they actually have 120.
). Remind: Conquering Khaorons is almost unpossible...my experiance says: bombard Khaoron's worlds to less than 10 bn pop and than use 3 times more troops. Of course offensive power and experiance of troops also have effect....for getting an overview use TroopEditor or this site (incl. table at the end)