Niggling buglets

Isn't killbots a tech that grants a soldiering bonus? I think your transports will invade faster with the bonus. The time can't be reduced below 3 turns for colonies and 5 turns for core worlds. Unfortunately, I don't think you have killbot units to put on your transports.

Upgrading ships seems to restricted to survey ships, prototypes, and command ships. It seems that retrofitting is no longer in the game. You can only retrofit in some obscure way that the devs missed. If you want it, you need to make a rally point, send some ships there, and then click the upgrade button.

I agree that we need to pull that for dead civilizations.

Outside of issues like that the advisors are very handy for new players.

I haven't seen this, but I will see if we can repro it here.

We never considered tying the particle color to the icon color. It's not a bad idea, but we wanted to give artists more freedom to make cool effects. And it may take away some of the visual interest if all beams are just bigger and bigger blue effects. In the end the particle's priority is to look cool. The type of weapon is conveyed in lots of other places.

Killbots provides a soldiering bonus, ie: your invasions take less time.

I think we have different concepts of what a colony is. I imagine a small campus, a few hundred people, living on an alien world. It is just a colony, like a moon base. In that scenario a military ship drops down, guns ready and there is little the colony can do to resist for more than a few months.

You are imaging a colony as a fully populated planet. In which case it is difficult to imagine taking it with a single ship.

I have seen other with the same thought as you. I wonder how we could better convey that it is just a simple small colony?

You may be right that this should be religated to a notification in the upper left rather than a popup. We will check it out. (what do other people think about this?)

It was too much to upgrade every individual ship so now you can only upgrade survey and command ships. Which also makes them feel more special. I was thinking about having a civilization ability that allowed that civ to upgrade all their ships for players that are into that. But I think most players will find it tedious.

I agree with Derek with how he has described the difference between a "colony" world and a "core" world. This is how I imagined it also.

I do see a potential peculiar "issue" that is not too likely to happen, but it could conceivably happen. Imagine you're at war with the Drengin, you conquer their home world of Drengi that had a population of 15. It took you 10 turns, but it is now yours. On turn 11, a Drengin fleet arrives and wipes out your fleet, while another fleet OR single ship sieges Drengi. IF I did not assign a leader to Drengi immediately, then it is a colony world with a pop of 15/1. The Drengin takes it back on turn 3 with only one ship. It should have a population of about 12 now, because it seems these colony worlds lose one pop each turn until down to 1. The Drengin could then assign a leader to their homeworld they just retook. 

Regarding upgrades of ships.

I really miss this feature that was in GC3. Some of the command ships are boring and not very powerful, even in the early game. And upgrading them is very limited, such that they become mostly useless. There are very few options to upgrading the weapons and then it is always whatever the primary weapon is they begin with (such as Beam) that can be upgraded. And then it can only be upgraded by +2. Most early mid-game ships are more powerful that the early command ships, even with upgrades. 

The option to upgrade my ships, perhaps an entire fleet, to the latest weaponry is always appealing and more effective as the game progresses. 

You can't argue against documenting the full mechanics of combat - formula and all - arguing that players need to study the combat logs and the battle viewer to understand how well their fleets are performing, and then go and make it incredibly misleading by using non-standard colours for the weapons. It's incredibly not helpful. 

1000% yes, those popups are exceedingly tedious. Throw it to the upper left with everything else please.

"I think we have different concepts of what a colony is. I imagine a small campus, a few hundred people, living on an alien world. It is just a colony, like a moon base." DP

Ah ha. I think that is exactly the problem. The use of the word "colony" is too ambiguous. Perhaps Outpost , Base, Camp, Frontier Settlement, or Outstation would be a better description and imply what is in your mind rather than mine. It would make much more sense that one warship could intimidate what is effectively a "space village" out there, cut off and lonesome, than what I imagined was a whole populated world.

"It was too much to upgrade every individual ship so now you can only upgrade survey and command ships. Which also makes them feel more special."DP

I do like the survey and command upgrade system but atm it is unbalanced - there are only two worthwhile upgrades: sensor range and the +4 +20% HP one, but that's only my opinion. It's a shame that mass fleet upgrades are not available but I get your point about it being tedious. In GalCivIII it could be used as an exploit to fool the AI. I still think it could be included in a simpler way - a whole fleet could be upgraded automatically, each ship to the highest specs in its class, but it should take a loooong time during which the fleet is unavailable, because it is in bits in a workshop somewhere. Rushing should be insanely expensive.

 "then go and make it incredibly misleading by using non-standard colours for the weapons. It's incredibly not helpful."

Surge72 agrees. I think your artists are expert enough to make cool explosions and laser and railgun and missile effects in the "right" colours and embellish them with blobs, wavey lines, different hues and saturation, and reserve green for space monster spit which, as we all know, is acidic and eats through hulls even when the monster is dead! Now you are afraid of even the little ones aren't you?

ADIT- I know that with the Core World/colony system you are trying to cut down on tedious micromanagement and I agree with that and it works reasonably well, but it's difficult to understand what all these "colonies" are doing, or why they matter - it's not intuitive or even explained particularly well. Could the player be given an option to specialise these planets as well as emphasise how small the settlements are? For example, a colony could be designated as either: Research Station; Farmstead; Military Base; Production Outpost; Cultural Settlement or Mining Camp. After that - no more management. The decision is based upon what information a player can glean from the planet description and what they want to achieve with the colony. If you don't want to specialise it remains an Outstation (or something)

 Just a thought.

To your last point: Don't you effectively specialize Colonies when you link them to a Core World?

Agree with you about the ambiguity over the word Colony. Let's say the President Biden wants to make Australia a Colony to feed his Core World The United States. A single four-crew rowboat made of two sailors and two soldiers with Glocks isn't going to cut the mustard, now, is it?

I personally adopted the Moonbase type approach - just a few simple slaves living on a planet ready to do your bidding as you see fit.

I feel like this is an area where the colony improvements can step in. The issue right now is....most improvements are very poor, and the ones that are actually good take a night and a day tech wise to get (hydroponics I'm looking at you).

But if the colony improvements were competitive, I think that would be a great way to give colonies a "specialized task".

BTW: If you are considering a name change I think outpost is a solid way to say "we are a thing but not a big thing"