Okay, new suggestions:
Whoo, lots of great ones here.
1. When I select a ship type from the side menu it should highlight that ship type to indicate I have them selected. At the very least it should flash to indicate it registered the click.
Another player already suggested that I make it show a border around any ships types that are currently selected on here (whether through this interface or another). It's on my list!
2. Black is an unreadable player colour, and this is on a BenQ FP241W (a highly thought of monitor) configured using a Spyder2Express.
Hmm, I can read it on my monitor, but I can see where it might be troublesome on many. I'll look at doing a replacement for this color.
3. Either display wormhole names over ship icons or provide me a key to bring them to front.
Ooh, great suggestion! Added to the list. I'll experiment to see if having it always show over top, or holding a key to show over top, works better in practice.
4. Option to reverse shift scroll behaviour
As in, make it always scroll faster, but hold shift to go slower? Are you talking about panning or zooming or both? Added to my list under the assumption you mean both.
5. Option to enable planet names on galaxy map, on 80 planets or less there's loads of room.
I think that will look really unreadable on even 80 planet maps, but to each his own. I'll make a settings option for it. In the meantime you can hold Ctrl to see them all.
6. Is there any reason for me to keep captured things like astro train stations? AI still seems to send trains to them.
Those haven't actually been captured by you, I don't think -- they are just enemy train stations in your territory. Any enemy ships in your territory are probably something you want to destroy, if you can. Train stations are never something to keep around.
7. Game doesn't seem to be differentiating between my unit X and enemy unit X in side panel. I see a red bomber icon, but this also doubles as my bomber icon.
This is by design. See here:
http://arcengames.com/mediawiki/index.php?title=AI_War_-_Planetary_Summary Especially in multiplayer games, there's just no way that I could split these out and still have room to show all of the various ship icons. I guess I could make that a settings option if it is important to you, but unless you have a huge monitor I think it's likely to be problematic.
8. Split side panel into categories: Starfighters, ships, economy, construction. Something like that. Make it easier to find stuff.
It already puts the smaller military stuff at the top, then the economic stuff, then the larger-icon stuff (generally starships, etc). I can't make visible category delimiters simply for reasons of space, though -- you can have really a ton of icons there late into a large game (four or more columns in extreme cases).
9. Make ships more intelligent about staying inside forcefields. Right now I don't think they try at all. This is my new method for trying to take down enemy shields with bombers, build my own
I'm guessing here that you mean your ships? The AI ships, when they are already under a force field, will endeavor to stay there. This is a fairly complex bit of logic, I can't think of a good way to handle it without bogging down performance to a rather extreme degree. This is one of those things where I think it's just a matter of positioning your ships more manually if it's that important to you -- or, get bigger force fields. The Mark I force fields are tiny, but Mark III are much bigger. I'm not one to generally suggest that micromanagement is a good thing, but the performance cost here would be so expensive that I can't see any way around it. Should be quite a good strategy for you to use when after enemy forcefields, by the way.
10. Add to hit chance for current target into a unit's tooltip.
That's already there... When you hover over an enemy ship while your ships are selected, it shows you both how much damage your ships will do (a range of damages, if there are multiple types selected), plus it shows you the lowest hit chance out of all the ships you have selected. Did you mean something else in addition to this?
11. Exclude scouts from CTRL-,
Ah, good call. Added to the list.
12. Free roaming engineers were returning to position without having repaired a nearby cruiser with no engine.
I think this is something on my list, but let me confirm: basically, if a ship has engine damage but is full up on hull health, engineers are not currently targeting them for repairs. Is that what you were seeing? That's on my list to be fixed, but let me know if there's more to it with what you are seeing.
13. Clicking in the Controls window causes the mouse wheel to cease functioning until you click in the game window. This does not generate a focus warning.
Yes, it also prevents key inputs from happening, it would seem. Windows focus management for you. I'm looking into that, but fortunately the clicking thing is a good workaround. I may have to rethink how the focus warning is shown in order to accommodate this situation, but I'm hoping to resolve the issue without you even having to click. Maybe I'll do both. Thanks for letting me know!
14. Mapping multiple jumps should show me the route even after I map my first destination. X to Y shows me a route, but holding shift and doing Y to Z does not.
Holding shift makes it show the connections to the planets you hover over, rather than the path to them. Showing the paths wouldn't be helpful, anyway, because it would be the path from the original planet rather than the end of the path you have started. I can't easily do it from the end of the path you have started, since your selected ships might have really different paths (if you gave some orders, reselected, etc). If you're issuing manual wormhole commands past a certain point, it's pretty much assumed that you'll click each node. This comes down to processing efficiency, too, for the most part -- when you have many ships selected and are giving complex orders, it could really grind the game to a halt with something more complex if I wasn't careful. And the key thing is that I don't feel like that would really improve usability even.
15. Grey out harvester build buttons when you don't own the planet.
Ooh, great call -- I should have thought to do that before.
16. Allow V moves on the galaxy map so units enter free-roaming mode upon arriving at destination planet.
This sort of mixing of movement modes is something that the engine doesn't currently support. It would be rather a challenge to shift that. Let me know if this is a major issue. though.
17. Is the AI command centre not represented by a tooltip icon? I think these should be V on the galaxy map they are so important. Really anything worthy of a tooltip icon should be displayable on the galaxy map, I really want to know where the datacentres are so I can lower the AI progress.
I'm not sure what you mean by "V on the galaxy map." But no, I didn't put them as an icon simply because you know implicitly if it exists -- if the AI controls the planet, it belongs to them. As for the other things worthy of tooltips being shown as display modes, those are all enemy ships which I'm not really supporting galaxy map display modes for -- those are intended to be for your team's ships, not the other way around. There just aren't enough keyboard keys or slots in the dropdown, for one, but for another that's the point of the priority mappings and having players do analysis of the intel summaries to determine where they want to strike next.
There are already a dozen or so enemy icons that might show up in the intel icons, and over the course of DLC and expansions I hope to expand that 3x or 4x (that's part of the fun of exploration). I don't think this would be a sustainable pattern, and I don't feel like it adds a lot if you are already doing priority mappings, so this is one I think I'm going to have to pass on.
18. Ability to add notes to the galaxy map (ala Sword of the Stars).
You know, I never played sword of the stars. Can you describe what you are looking for in general? Would this be notes by planet, or just notes that you stick in whatever empty space you want, or something else? I think this could be interesting, especially for games that you don't play for a while and then come back to much later.
That's it for now
Whew! That's quite a bit!
I think I'm getting the hang of the game. Will have to up the difficulty, 5 is too passive (though I do have random personalities and may well be overconfident 
so I think next game I'll go for 7 with fast and deadly.
Yeah, the style of the AI can make a huge difference. Even on 4, if you play against Raiders or Mad Bombers or something, they are as aggressive as heck. But either way, on 7 you get much more frequent attacks, and the attacks are more substantial, and the planets are harder to take in general. 7 is the level that I play on, and I can win with that most of the time (on easier or moderate AI styles). Going up to 8 means I can win sometimes, but I lose even more, and I'm lucky to survive 30 minutes on level 10. Sounds like you might be well ready for level 7, anyway -- I look forward to hearing how it goes!
Thanks again for taking the time to add all your thoughts! Some more great suggestions here.
