Hey Raven,

Getting some more players into the game would definitely be a boon but we're really hitting the provisioning profile limit wall now with various players getting beta fatigue along with the the no shows that inevitably happen. We're very close to the point to where we think we can start doing a region limited release without leaving folks in that region feeling like they're playing an unfinished game. Obviously, we've got a couple major items (tutorials, iap/push notifications) to wrap up before that can happen but we're close.

We definitely feel that players should have to defend their mining colonies particularly given all the options that are now available for defending them but we have discussed making it so that attacking a mining colony simply leaves the planet unclaimed so that the attacking player would still need to send in a mining colony / colony ship of their own. This wouldn't stop someone from taking out a string of mining colonies but it does slow down the over all rate of expansion of someone attacking in that fashion since the attack doesn't automatically grant them a new revenue stream in addition to hurting the other player.

A turn based / resource point system would be a pretty big change to the game at this point. I do agree that it would be a good way to make the game completely fair but that's something we'll probably need to look into more after release based on user feedback / demand. At this point we're pretty happy with the overall balance and are looking more to fine tune than overall at least until we've gotten the game out to a wider audience.

The shipyard limit wasn't intended to be that low, Tsagoth has now switched it so there's a hard cap at 1000 objects instead of placing a hard cap on the number of shipyards. As for not being able to scrap shipyards you're right that is a bug.