New version .850 (Tutorials! - Anyone "waiting for further notice" please test!)

[PokerChen]

As long as you strongly discourage farming exploits, you'll get the realtime play down to those numbers. In the earlier alphas I did a lot of convoy raids in order to gather enough bribes and credit to influence some of the races. Evucks were really difficult, never manged to get one of their elders to flip. Burlusts, you can still game, IIRC, by killing warlords until you gather enough to pressure them into a federation. It can make them somewhat ignorable until you put in a cooldown timer on those duel missions. There isn't much else you can do with them since the Evuck blackmails are too expensive for their cost.

"I will have my Federation, even if it means depopulating your planet one burlust at a time."

It's a little bit jarring that the game will keep spawning warships for you to kill in duels, even if they have no standing army because they were on the brink of extermination for several game years.

[keith.lamothe]

"I will have my Federation, even if it means depopulating your planet one burlust at a time."

Honestly I think the Burlusts would be down with that.

[Pepisolo]

Eh, personally I'd rather not much focus be put into the smuggling missions other than making sure they are not outright broken on the higher difficulties as Misery claims. I mean, they aren't too interesting now, but the suggestion of making them some kinda TBS stealth game just sounds so off-putting to me.

I don't think introducing some stealth into the smuggling mission will change things too much. Just instead of a static splodge of enemies and roadblocks around the exit, you'd have a few patrolling ships instead. That said, I really do need to play a lot more, as maybe the smuggling missions pick up in the later missions. The ones I played weren't particularly fun and seemed more like pointless busywork.

[Hyfrydle]

Just had to attempt the same smuggling mission four time and it was only the second one. Had no problems in the past but I now realise that a bit more strategy is involved and planning each move is key.

I was a bit confused that I had to get past Thoraxian ships when they were not even spacefaring yet. I thought it was the other spacefaring races that tried to prevent the mission.

Love the new tutorials things are starting to become clearer in the mist 

Ignore the Thoraxian part they had sneaked into space whilst I wasn't looking.

[NickAragua]

Just wanted to say that while I'm not an alpha tester, I'm really looking forward to playing this game when it comes out.