No worries, it's my pleasure.
As far as the difficulty is concerned, I would not say it has gone down -- perhaps in the latest betas it
may have, but that's a temporary thing if so. The general experience has been that the difficulty has been creeping up and up and up, and so I have recently done some things to cut it back a tad, but at the same time a lot of new stuff has been added for the AI in the form of all their new guard posts, the new barracks, etc.
That said, with any major rebalancement we're unlikely to get it right on the first go. What I can say is that I've lost or stalemated 6 of the last 7 games I've played in 2010, at difficulty 7 (my team just lost the 6th last weekend in my absence, and we started a new one). So far, in the first twoish hours of the next game, it is seeming easier, but then again it always seems easier at the start. I thought we were going to steamroll the last one, too, but after 18 hours we got rolled by a 13k-ship cross planet attack.
With the newer versions, the idea is to be having many fewer stalemates, because at least half of all games seemed to be hitting that in the past. So, now it may feel easier to progress outwards, and this is by design. However, even with it being easier to progress, it's also harder to defend because of the sneaky counter-attack guard posts from the AI, and all that good stuff. Granted, not all of them are implemented yet, so that may be further skewing things a bit on the easier side. But I'm not 100% certain, I don't have enough data yet. My overall goal was to have games be a bit shorter (because length had been creeping up, too), at around 10-15 hours on average, maybe, instead of 15-25 being more average lately.
As always, though, the difficulty isn't just a simple linear thing. Some map seeds are, frankly, harder than others. Sometimes you're surrounding by mark IV planets, sometimes the ARSes are all on heavily-defended planets, and sometimes everything is just a cakewalk because of the planets' layouts. There are more AI weapons than ever throughout the galaxy, though, so honestly I'd been more worried about it remaining too hard and complex than the other way around until you posted here.
Sometimes a given map TYPE will be really easy or really hard depending on your playstyle. In the past, snake and tree maps were really easy to defend on, but really easy to get stalemated with. Now that stalemate risk has been reduced, they may just be easier. But I don't have a lot of data. Grid and Hubs maps were always harder, and now with a lot of the new features they are even moreso most likely, because of the emphasis on having to split your fleets for both offensive and defensive maneuvers.
The AI types obviously also have an enormous impact on the difficulty depending on your playstyle, as do the bonus ship types you get, the minor factions and AI plots you have turned on, and so forth and so on. If you're feeling like you want a challenge and you have the CoN expansion, I'd heartily recommend the hybrid hives as a handy way to get a beating if you'd like one.
Or advanced hives if you REALLY are feeling masochistic.
In all seriousness, those were just slaughtering most players within 2ish hours, and so we toned them down a lot recently, though. Most of our reports lately have been along those lines (ack! it killed me in X new ways waaay too fast!) rather than the other way around, so some of our rebalancements later have indeed been trying to dial it back, but the overall goal is that the challenge level of difficulties 6, 7, 8, and all the rest would stay roughly the same over time, just with more INTERESTING things at each level. It's also possible that you're just better now at the game, since you last played; the full AI logic isn't really brought out until difficulty 7, so you might want to graduate to that. Though actually, lately there are some things that don't even appear until difficulty 8 (see, we keep adding all these new and more difficulty things).
The main difficulty reduction we've made lately has been in the reduction in the AI ship caps, but that was more to reduce grindyness and improve performance in long games (and to shorten games in general) rather than to actually make it easier. The AI planets are just filled with new, massive, high-health high-attack weapons like the guard posts, ions, fortresses, etc, that should make up for the lower ship cap. 10 of those are often worth several thousand smaller ships, in other words, so the ship count itself can be misleading.
Or that's the idea -- whether the balance is exactly right yet or not is of course something that could be debated quite a lot. So far it's looking about right, but the jury is still out and it's curious your experience with it (I presume you're on the latest betas). So, I guess we'll just see with time!
