Yeah, the loot level thing seems odd too, the exception thrown when you put a value over 3 says it's too high - (3), but if you set the value to 3 it says it's too much. Setting the loot value to 1 or 2 doesn't throw an exception, but it doesn't seem to make a difference. Hopefully there's a patch soon.
On the note of OwnerPlayerIndex, while it doesn't seem to correspond to the slot of the lobby players, you can however set multiple start planets, in the case of vasari, I find myself starting with 2x the starting fleet, one for both planets i set as player 1 when I successfully get the right starting spot.
As for artifacts, there's some debug options set to false in one of the setting files, one of which seems to be a GUI to add items to the ships, can't figure out how to access it even when setting it to true though.
