Why was the planet status replaced with research status on the Shipyard screen?  

It's probably because you're using the galaxy background and the research status is part of that screen.  Please figure out a way to return the planet status to this screen.

Early thoughts...

Some small nice changes/additions/bug fixes nothing hugely exciting if I'm honest but it's patch between DLC/expansions that's standard I guess (not a criticism).

Issues and wish list...

I really dislike the slider, it's a micromanagement time sink reminiscent of the awful wheel system in GCIII.  A couple of extra buttons options would have been nice/fine I didn't really have any major problems with the old system.  With the slider I'll end up tweaking it every turn for little benefit, very annoying.

There been some changes to the rally system a new button added.  Personally while I use rally points a lot, I don't use the "go to" orders because the ships gain a 50% move bonus when within your territory but with the existing "go to" orders ships often end their move outside of your borders frequently meaning they lose the move bonus and take longer to get to a destination.  If you could set a ship to move to a rally point and then immediately have them move to another rally point automatically on reaching a rally point I would use the rally feature extensively and be very grateful for it as it would be a huge time saver.  Currently if you use "go to" orders especially over long distances you have to forgo playing optimally.

Speaking of ship movement in 2.8 I'm sure the +3 movement finisher was bugged it works once but doesn't stack on future researching.  Bit of an issue on the crazy size maps I like to play.

I didn't see anything regarding a post Warlords AI update.  The AI only builds fighter, bombers and cruisers (no Corvettes, Destroyers etc.) and I think the battleship very late into the game.  Each ship type always uses the the same tactics and targets making them 100% predictable and easy to counter.

If each AI was building every ship type available to it and each AI favored certain tactics and targets and equipment it would make the game so much fun an interesting to play. 

It's great giving the player cool new things to exploit but if the AI can't or won't use them it's actually a big issue.  The AI is at a huge disadvantage currently in this area to a barely competent player.

More options in the galaxy setup screen.  I'd rather not have to resort to modding to generate the galaxies I like to play.

No buildings that can't be destroyed (annoying) and a way to filter the buildings in the planetary menu.  Also a show tiles switch without any buildings, it's hard to tell what's underneath when something is built on a tile.

Thanks/Diolch

Hey, thanks for the extensive feedback!

So if I understand correctly, your "go to" orders would be within your territory, but then you'd also want for the ship to skip a turn, in order to gain the movement bonus, right? Cause if it was to immediately move towards next "go to" point, there would be a chance for no bonus to trigger.

Thanks for the AI feedback, it's very helpful.

Also could you expand on galaxy setup screen? While it's a common request, everyone wants something specific, heh

There are some issues in the XML files that I will post in a followup.

One thing I noticed when reviewing changes is the unneeded introduction of tabs in the XML files. 

This has to be annoying even for the other devs who work on the code base.

The following is in LeaderTraitText.xml.

'HS=HS_ColonyGrossIncomess' should be:

'HS=HS_ColonyGrossIncome' instead.

+3 Control Per Turn is too much for a leader/unit trait attribute.  I suspect it was meant to be +1 instead.

The following need to be corrected.  I submitted fixes to grammar issue previously, but appears these remained uncorrected.  The " to," should be removed as it is an improper use of a preposition and the comma is rarely needed before "and".

Say you have a large but oddly shaped territory, you want your ships to move through your space as much as possible to get the 50% move bonus each turn on reach to their final destination e.g. front of a major conflict.  Say you have a ship with 35 movement.  On the turn it is built it leaves the shipyard and moves to the first rally point 10 tiles away still within your territory.  On reaching that rally point tile on the same turn it immediately would move to a 2nd rally point say 15 tiles away (it does this because you have set orders for ships reaching a certain rally point to move to another.  On reaching the 2nd rally point it would move immediately on the same turn towards a 3rd rally point which is 20 tiles away.  (also because you had set up rally orders).  It would continue moving between rally points until it runs out of movement that turn or runs out of orders for each rally point upon reaching the final rally point tile in the sequence.  You would be able to setup chain of rally points to navigate through the map quicker. The bonus movement is only lost if the ship ends a turn outside your territory so good placement of the rally points is necessary.  On the bigger maps you could save considerable time doing this and get your ships where you want them a lot faster.

More options to choose sectors and sector sizes and connection points between sector.  Make the existing options less opaque than they currently are.  Be able to determine the amount of races per sector.  Allow some sectors to be empty should the player wish.  Bigger sectors should have more civilizations starting in them. If the player expects the settings to produce one type of map and gets something radically different then there are issues I feel that is the case currently.  You could use an advanced settings tab to hide away all the gory details from more casual players who just want a quick no nonsense small map game.

There is something hosed with the ship builds again.

The Piercing Breeze (beam weapon) ships are not showing up in the build queue. 

This is a case where I am intentionally researching beam tech over kinetic or missiles.  But the beam ships never show up in the build queues.

T66 and none of the Beam Weapon ships are showing up in the build queue.   Not one during the entire game. 

no - Piercing Breeze

no - Point of Light

no - Cutting Principle

T67 Cutting Principle finally showed up.

I purchased 2 Elerium from the market on T66 as I have not had any this entire game and suspected that this is a factor.

Something appears broken in this build as Piercing Breeze uses the CutterBlueprint blueprint and the only component "required" is BeamWeapon.

Yet, even when having ability to build BeamWeapons, it never shows up in the build queue.

Customized ships using the wrong default ship design name.

For example, when attempting to customize "Cutting Principle", it is using "Concluding Words M15" as the default ship design name:

Concluding Words comes from:

    <StringTable>
        <Label>AltarianPaladin_Name</Label>
        <String>Concluding Words</String>
    </StringTable>
    <StringTable>
        <Label>AltarianPaladinEnhanced_Name</Label>
        <String>Concluding Words</String>
    </StringTable>

Cutting Principle comes from:

    <StringTable>
        <Label>AltarianCorvette_Name</Label>
        <String>Cutting Principle</String>
    </StringTable>
    <StringTable>
        <Label>AltarianCorvetteEnhanced_Name</Label>
        <String>Cutting Principle</String>
    </StringTable>

These names are associated with 2 different sets of ShipClass and BluePrintDef and should not be getting mixed.

If I customize a "Cutting Principle" ship design, then I want it to keep the same name, by default.

Not make me cancel and redo it just to confirm the inappropriate impromptu name-swap that just occurred and get the correct default name.

Thanks for the detailed bug description Dorian!

Did your Cutting Principle blueprint use elerium based beams, once it appeared?

This update was pushed live today, can you confirm which issues reported here are still present in the build?