Edit: Ack! This was supposed to be a reply to the 1.2b bugs topic. Don't know if it's possible to move it. Sorry about that!
I've been playing beta 2 for a bit now and wanted to post some impressions.
Overall, excellent job with fixing the AI's management of planets. The planets I've captured are much better utilized with no observable extraneous or misplaced buildings.
Also, excellent job with managing the AI's use of starbases of all kinds. The AI set up military and economic starbases intelligently and even used influences bases in an attempt to avoid the subversion of their worlds. I hadn't seen that before on the levels I've played at (still working my way up).
Thank you for synching the minimap to the main map! That helps a lot. Thanks also for the ability to upgrade ships much more easily, though I would like to request the ability to upgrade individual fleets, if that's feasible to implement.
The only problems I've noted are not new to 1.2, but they're not major, either. They are:
When setting planets to auto-launch ships to Fleet rally points, the ships are frequently launched without any orders at all. This doesn't happen all the time, but it does happen with at least a few ships each turn. In my case, it usually (but not exclusively) happens with constructors, but I'm not sure if that's simply because I build more of them than anything else.
The icons that fall on the right of the screen for ships built, etc., still don't gracefully handle the case where there are more icons than can fit on the screen in one vertical line. They bunch up at the top of the screen, and some don't display at all, leaving blank gaps at the bottom of the screen below new icons on subsquent turns. When this happens, sometimes one will float mysteriously from the bottom to the top at times, as has been described by someone previously.
When the dialog comes up that summarizes what was done, built, etc., in the previous turn, if one clicks on Goto to visit the planet and then clicks on the Build Ship button, any alien planets subverted immediately display, and the Build Ship dialog applies to the subverted planet, not the planet originally visited. Pressing Back To Planet returns to the subverted planet, however, this gets more complicated if more than one planet is subverted in a single turn. One has to remember which planets were subverted and visit them later to make any changes.
This same summary dialog doesn't scroll directly with the mouse wheel. One must put the mouse in the slider on the right to be able to scroll with the mouse wheel.
Very intermittently, a starbase loses its visibility and is entirely covered by the fog of war as if it had no visibility at all, even though the Eyes of the Universe has been built. Just clicking on it restores the visible area.
Ships that are in the middle of an autopilot move seem to resume their movement with one less movement point than they should have. For example, a ship with a movement of 22 resumes its movement with 21/22 points. This seems to happen across the board for all ships.
The dialog box for assigning rally points as destinations still isn't alphabetized. I still wish it were.
That's about it for now. Thanks very much for making an already great game better and better!
