Many thanks again, all. More good stuff coming today, too: I was playing near the endgame last night, and the balance still doesn't feel quite right, but it's getting closer!
o Going along with the above, there is now quite a bit of strategy and puzzle-style challenge
I think you should make the guard posts have a color and an arrow. I think we could do some interesting things with that.
Heh.
Are the wave amplification effect supposed to happen before I have them finished? Because suddenly a wave of 2000 bombers came along where I normally got 200 sized waves. I managed to kill me off, but they got dangerously close to my command center. I have killed the warp gate now of course as well, but thought I had better time to do that since the Ion cannons takes a while to make. 
(Edit: it also seem max wave size is 2000, correct?)
Yep on both questions. The max wave size is I think 2000 per AI player per line item in the listing; in a multiplayer game, that would make the max cumulative "announced at one time" wave size 2000 x 2 x NumberPlayers.
On the amplification effect, that does indeed happen when things are still under construction, by design. They see that you're building whatever, and get pretty alarmed.
So in this new endgame are we still being heavily penalized for taking planets adjacent to the homeworld? Or do you think the ship caps mean that we can now reasonably take an adjacent planet to launch the attack from?
Well, in 3.080 I think it would be suicide same as it always has been, if not moreso. That's something I've already started to address in 3.081, but I've got more planned for that, too. Basically the idea is that it should still be a questionable decision, but that sometimes it would be the right decision -- in the past it was
never the right decision, so that's a big change.
I understand it's tactically somewhat interesting to have to launch attacks from more than one planet away, but given what it looks like you're trying to do I'd think that the final homeworld should be set up by default in such a way that you -want- to be setup in an adjacent world, maybe have an AI type (or several) where that isn't a good idea, or guard posts that you need to destroy before taking an adjacent planet, etc.
Yeah, I agree that I'd really like it to vary by the type of homeworld you are facing. Not necessarily the AI type, but making it so that depending on what guard post types are there, you might need various different tactics. One problem with how it was before was that it was SO black and white: one decision was really wrong, another was really right. All that does is reward expert players for their niche knowledge while penalizing everyone else, and that's not strategically interesting or something I generally like to do. That situation arose somewhat organically, and I never had a good way to logically combat that in the past until now (coming up in 3.081).
Also a quick question concerning devourer golem and neinzul hybrid hives: Is it intended that the hive ships attack the devourer golem without the golem firing back?
BTW: The hybrids are an awesome addition. Annying and hard to kill :-)
Glad you enjoy them! I would have to defer to Keith on the hybrids at the moment, I haven't had much chance to do much with them. But I'd start by looking at their immunities, it might just be that they have immunities of a sort that blocks the devourer, I'm not sure.
