Nice job guys!  Always nice to see so many updates in a short amount of time.  It's great seeing that the AI does not ask you to do missions every 3-5 minutes in endless waves.  It looks like you stopped them from requesting missions against your ally as well - kudos!

I am still a pretty new user, but some things I have observed since the newest patch before 1.32 and it was not mentioned in the release notes. 

Sorry if I just misunderstood how something should work!

A buddy and I are still refinding our abilities and we do only AI games, but that should not matter for this info.

1. Phase jumping was not working to starbases or back.   I also only had 1 operational phase jump lane going from my home world to a dead asteroid.  The other phase lines did nothing and they seemed enabled (by default)?  This seemed fine pre-patch (I never tried the starbase one though..)

2.  My buddy is a TEC guy and we played 2v2 on a large map with cruel and unfair.  When his capital ships jumped into their starsystem pretty much ALL of their planets began revolting due to culture.  We have never seen anything like this and it seemed really off.  You were also able to see his color going from the systems he was in (not owned) to almost everything in that starsystem.

3. (more of a question) Is there a mode where the AI will attack in groups instead of sending endless waves of wimpy fleets?  I would have expected that the higher difficulty levels would amass forces before attacking, but we still see small 5/10/30 ship fleets that are a joke and only act as capital ship EXP farms.  Most of our games are based on just grabbing a few choke points and we have almost no resistance after as their capital ships are almost always level 1-3 and 3 is rare.

Hi Ryat.

1. There is a starbase ability/slot called Phase Stablizer.  The way I read the description is that it allows me to utilize a planet based phase stabilitizer to lane ships between my planet(s) and that starbase.  It was not functioning as such.  To the second then at least I was not going nuts and maybe that same bug was affecting the star base(s).

2. Yes, that is correct.  We play pretty much the same way all the time and it never happened before in 30-40 games, so it just seemed odd, but given that you feel TEC ships can do that then it might be normal.

3. Thank you - I will try using Aggressive. 

Thanks for the amazing support!

Thank you! lets work towards making it to update v1.4 

The Insurgency tech doesn't spawn culture, and usually the AI can deal with them or rebuild before they blow up much.

OK, OK, I am suitably chastised. Next time I will be more specific (in regards to culture repulsion), and my bad about the Insurgency, I thought it produced culture (guess I need to get off the Vasari and play some more TEC). Ya'all are forum sharks (I mean that in a good way!).

Any chance of getting a DX11 render for Sins? Its supposed to be much more efficient. Its quite apparent in games like World of Warcraft that added one along with the old dx9.

Mine auto detection is useless. They target a mine and just sit there. Fire range of the detector is not long enough and no other strike craft or ships attack the detected mine if in engagement range.

I have to pretty much manually move them around to detect the mines...

Detectors are also suicidal by flying through a minefield to detect a mine on the far side

Actually I noticed it is far more efficient to just move your scout near a mine field then to order it to manually use its reveal mine ability. Once close enough the scout will auto use the ability, saving you a lot of effort.

You are confusing auto casting with manual use. I meant manual as in you actually hit the detect mines ability button and then select the mine you want the scout to target. This more often than not does nothing at all for some reason. If you have autocasting on (which you always should for this ability), its easier to just move a scout near a minefield than to actually tell it to use the ability itself.

I think it's understandable for some ships to be significantly more powerful in one part of the game than in another.

As long as the Sova isn't unavoidably overpowered in the early-game.

The Sova is fairly weak late game but early game there is 'concern'. What GoaFan77 has stated makes a lot of sense if this issue were to be addressed. I merely wanted to bring it to the attention of Yarlen and crew for their consideration.