[PvK]

Thanks for the great input, Arralen!

One thing is it shows me how unclear some things are to players when I'm not around to explain.

What is the zip filename, origin or whatever of your version 3.0.7? I see I have posted a 3.0.6.beta.zip which is older than 3.0.6. I don't see where I posted a 3.0.7. I may have forgotten, but I'm not seeing it on the forum either.

I don't remember ever enabling the CD music, certainly not on purpose.

I know there are limitations of drones which can't be modded away, but probe drones do serve a limited purpose. They are the only units which can move through warp points by themselves (attack the warp point, IIRC), and they don't give the enemy experience when they get destroyed. They are useful as a cheap way to see what evemy defenses exist at a location, or on the other side of a warp point, without giving away experience or losing morale due to ship loss. Also it just seemed like an ability that should be easy to get to make an unmanned exploration probe (we could more or less do that in the 20th Century, after all).

Yeah, there's no way to mod in a way to recover drones in strategic mode, or to remove the button that makes it look possible, that I know of.

Design type Satellite Layer - ok, I'll add that.

I don't claim the tech costs are perfect, but I did give them many layers of thought and tweaking and so on over the years. Unfortunately, all the reasoning isn't fully documented. Medical Technology is the ability to stop amazingly deadly planet-exterminating horror viruses. As I recall, there's no way to raise the natural disease level above a certain point, so the tech cost is balanced to make it a meaningful choice and a serious thing to have to deal with, etc. But I am open to suggestions and explanations of what doesn't seem to make sense or might be better, etc.

Starliners in 3.x are carefully balanced against transports and warships to have a niche, in a complex way - as I recall, when you research higher levels of Starliner Modules, they become smaller, making room for more engines and supplies or whatever. In 3.x there are several techs that start out rather clunky but gain more interesting design possibilities as you get higher tech levels.

I understand you're not used to slow ships, but what's unbalanced about the speeds? Civil ships with low tech engines are cheap low-tech things. Warships with better engines go faster, etc. Colony ships are supposed to be a major undertaking (aka PITA).

I forget what the thinking was about small satellite launchers not housing a small satellite. Your point makes common sense... I think it was just that this way, high-tech cargo space has more of an effect, because less space is assumed to be using the built in generic storage of the launcher. It does seem like it'd make sense to either include enough for the smallest satellite, or none at all. The typical solution of course is to include cargo components.

Fighters are not well balanced in 3.x yet, but you're not right about advanced armor making fighters impotent - a stack of fighters pools its damage against armor (which unfortunately can't be modded).

So what about the max systems 130 without changing high number of AI opponents?

I don't think the Empire Point Storage is excessive. Proportions tends to have long-term resource efficiency games (e.g. building up resources during peacetime to burn during war), and even with that and the other things that store heaps of resources, storage is still an issue and facilities may be worthwhile to add more storage.

Max mines per sector is 13 because mines in 3.x represent entire gigantic barrage minefields or many devices, not single devices. Minesweepers are similarly reduced.

Maximum Planet Percent Value 1000 means you could theoretically use special technology (e.g. Value Improvement Plants IIRC) to develop a resource value of a planet to 1000.

Unlike vanilla SE4, there are many technologies in Proportions where lower levels are still very useful even after higher levels are developed. So using the filters that only show the latest techs, or convenience features that auto-upgrade to the latest techs, is generally not a good idea. There are a few cases where upgrade paths that can be done at one level of research, become unavailable at later research levels. Unfortunately there's no great way to avoid that.

I thought the Transport Minister just took your transports and moved stuff with them - is it really meant to construct pop transports?