Hello,

We are working on a community-focused update based on your requests.  The following is a preview of some of the changes we have in store.

Some key community reported issues we've addressed:

• Merging fleets not longer renames them.
• Custom ships work better with mods
• Artificial life forms can no longer build farms because robots don't eat food.  
• Your commonwealth worlds can no longer flip worlds in your empire (because that was treason!).  

Please read below for all of the changes:

Gameplay

• Nerfed Lossless Life Support module.
• Fix typos in Lossless Mining module descriptions.
• Update Tourism bonus for Popular Race trait to be flat 1 and 2% instead of multipliers of 10 and 20%
• Update united planet tourism board to be flat with a 10% bonus (was a multiplier of 100% which was crazy).  
• Colonizing the Promethion Refinery precursor world now grants  5 Promethion
• Set Virtual Vacation to be a player wonder.
• Change InflunacePerTurn from Multiplier to Flat on the Galactic Showcase.
• Fixed mismatch of description and text in the Antimatter Weapon Colonizing event.
• Tweaked pathfinding to not attempt to find a path to the closest node to a blocked destination if the start tile is the closest node.
• Silicon-based life can terraform and colonize high-level extreme worlds.
• Synthetic lifeforms: Removed farms, and enabled terraforming Improvements and high-end Extreme world techs.
• Fix Orphaned Improvements and techs in the Retribution tech tree.
• Fixed issue with Iridium tech tree failing on Tariff Focus specialization.

UI

• Changed it so that when you merge a fleet, it will keep a custom name for the resulting fleet. If both fleets being merged have custom names, it keeps the fleet name of the bigger fleet.
• Adjust Economic Warning Flavor Text to fit with new Conversation popup font size.
• Fix typo in Precursor Research Node description.
• Improved the text alignment on the UP Resolutions window

Bugs

• Fix for custom ship style sets having the wrong strategic icons. They will have to re-save their ship style sets (and change the effect ships classes to what they want along with their text since that is info that is saved off). Prevents them from having to remake the ship style sets and only deal with what was changed.
• You can no longer assign commanders to planets.
• Allow ships with one per player components to upgrade to ships with the same components
• Cleans up code that clears/applies rebellion status to prevent fedge cases where planets can flip when they shouldn't (like when the tile is owned by a commonwealth of the planet owner)
• Addressed an MP crash related to mismatched DLC
• Fix for mismatched Strategic Icons on some ship classes
• Fixed Typos in Plasma Arc event.
• Fixed issues with administrators not being awarded properly in campaigns.  
• Fix for ships that were getting pinned under planets
• Don't crash if a faction is missing some of its data.
• If you upgrading a ship with a unique design to another design that does not have the unique component, you no longer lose the unique component forever.  
• Added the Korath staring ship that is required for preview in ship designer mode.

Mod fixes

• Better support for custom ships created with mods
• Better support for modded techs that unlock multiple items at once.  

Retribution

• Fixes issue where Hhypergates didn't fire any shots during battle because they didn't have range.
• Changed the hHyperlane tooltip to account for the minimum move cost, so it will now show the max bonus as 900% instead of +-100%.
• Remove extra space in the Korath faction description.
• Add lossless life support back into the Retribution tech tree.
• Updated Thalan conversation text to reflect that they bring in multiple ships now in mission 4.
• Add basic Block hulls to Korath Ship style.