I think so too
. And thx.
Those things you mentioned are on our to-do-list at upper positions (after minor race ships and the tactical screen where you can hail or retreat from battle and several other quick things that round the edges of BotE a bit).
Atm. combat is fought out to the death (btw. there is a combat simulator at the star-trek-games.com forum or at
www.botf2.com/bote/shared%20documents/files/ page) always when non-allied or non-NAP fleets meet each other in a sector. As you noticed fleets are by far not always fully-shown on galaxy map. Mostly you don't even see a big fleet coming at you if you have no sensor strength in your systems. Camouflage abilities of ships have 6 levels in-game: Stealth(every ship has stealth) 1,2,3 and Cloak(only Rotharians and Khaoron have them) 4,5,6. Both result in ships being invisible on galaxy map if no scout or online-scanner is in the area. Stealth 1 is rather useless, 2 or 3 can be nasty. Cloak is really nasty. You need at least 1 or 2 scouts to see small cloaked fleets or small parts of larger cloaked fleets surrounding your sector (well it should be that way shouldn't it, that's why it's called cloaking
).
Later on you get isolinear scanners and lots of other things helping you to detect those fleets. But one likely forgets to actually build and man those buildings (me too). But it's really important to do so. 100% is also not the upper maximum which would be mathematically correct, but the figure goes even higher so with a 100% scan strength you probably only catch a large part of stealth fleets and a medium part of cloaked fleets, not so much the really full extent of the enemy fleet though there's some randomness in that too.
All in all, if your fleets are attacked out of nowhere, quickly build some scouts. Have 2 of them at least with your larger fleets, 3-4 in your main fleet(s).
Once battles are not always fought to death and the tactical screen is available, one gets to know which ships are in the attacking fleet (at least when fighting them) and can react by retreating and so on.
As for research, it's only possible right now to get down to the files via the editors provided on the pages linked above and get the "source" view of what they can do. An in-game database is still not coded yet. Those 3 editors (minor race, buildings and ships) are quite powerful and tools for modding and changing balance of the game. You might find them interesting to get a look at.
We made research similar to BotF, our spiritual predecessor. There it was the same way. Making it more complex or "Ascendancy-like" (which I actually found really cool in that old game) was once an option but since the game is already quite demanding in the other gameplay features it had, we sticked to the classic 6-area approach. Via the buildings and their tech requirements, enough complexity is generated (I know, the database
).
The icons above planets mean bonusses just like in good old birth of the federation. Tooltips are also on our to-do-list. Hyperlinks not. It's not that easy to code that within the old MFC architecture. We choose it because it was the most powerful and stable one back when we started 4 years ago. Today we would choose other programming platforms like .NET and WPF where such things would be coded in no-time.
Anyway, the other icons symbolize the other resources like Deuterium (always over class N or O planets), Crystals, Iridium (often over class H ones) and Duranium (class R).
glad you like it too so far. Due to lack of easily accessible in-game documentation the game right now requires to get a bit deeper into it and the modding tools available.