Hey, thanks for the suggestion. The main thing is a question of balancing the difficulty, and I would worry that this would cause some maps to be inexplicably easier than others. Right now, you can find relatively soft targets at various places in the maps -- Mark II or Mark I planets where the AI has not yet reinforced are really easy to take once you are Mark III with most of your ships, and if you hit them fast then they don't have much chance to get bigger. Some of these are really resource rich, some of them are really poor, and everything in between.
I definitely plan to do more to make the maps even more varied than they currently are, but making softer targets than presently exist is probably not the way that I'm going to go. Most of these new variances will most likely be some sort of bonus that the players can go find if they are interested, often at some sort of cost, etc -- just things that provide interesting, difficult decisions, rather than "free-ish" soft targets that can be taken without consequence (just because, people start to feel like that's kind of a grind when they have too many low-level targets without interesting challenges or not enough rewards, from what I've heard from players).
Thanks for the thoughts, as always!
