I do not know if this has been brought up before but I have noticed that when you are playing as the Borg, any ship you assimilate is weaker than the one you were trying to capture and was wondering why the Borg don't have any research to improved the systems on captured ships, I mean shouldn't a ship captured by the Borg be stronger than the non-captured counterpart anyway. Just my 2 cents worth.

More than likely it is because once one faction captures another it becomes that factions unit, and it falls under that particular factions research tree. For example the Borg does not have phaser, or photon research in its research tree. So a captured fed, klingon, romulan, or dominion ship would revert back to its pre-research stats, because the borg doesn't have those researches in its tree. You cant have more than one research tree per faction so it would be impossible to make those stats cross over to another faction. Plus it would make no sense to add all of the other factions researches to the Borg just so the buffs can cross over. Its a lot more trouble than what it is worth. Trust me.

I haven't encountered mines yet but noticed I seem to crash on the rebellion version at about 2 hours of game play. Simply drops to desktop with no warning. 2 times in a row so far, will play again later today. All graphic settings are sat to max (highest detail), 1280x1024x60hz (full screen). 

System:

GeForce GTX460

Processor: AMD A6-3620 (quad core)

8gb Ram

Windows 7 x64

This is the only mod I'm running.

Oh, playing Federation. (of course)

They are.  You have an Ability for this, it's on your shipyards and the Advanced Sphere.

When you take over a ship, any loss of stats on it's part means you have terrible research parity with your enemy.  Borg research is massively better in hull and antimatter regeneration, but they have no parity with shields and weapons from the other races.  Once you buff them, they will destroy, with great ease, their unassimilated counterparts.

Have a crash on a newly started game. Sent you the auto save file.

I've noticed how OP the Borg are... and it should be that way. Look at ST Canon and the Borg are REALLY OP!     Took my empire and 2 others to push them back.

Heh, nope. I never play with those. I find those annoying.  I did set the fleet level to large.

7 hr, 10 player, multi star, with lg fleets, and HW/Flagship/Dip victory conditions, with no problems

I made a similar mistake a couple of weeks ago while working on SotYR - I overwrote the wrong save.

I can't seem to get the Defiant's In System Warp ability to work, any clues on how to use it?

It worked in the last version of Diplomacy.

The Borg were never intended to be a playable faction. Originally they were the pirate faction. However that idea failed miserably (Game ending borg attacks too early, and crash issues left, and right). We intended the Borg to be played by the AI only. However to do that you would have to make them unselectable in the game setup. Just like the pirate faction, and defenders. So we had to make it to where you can play as the Borg for everything to work right. Just know the Borg are intentionally overpowered, and meant to be played by the AI only.

Without giving anyway any spoilers, I have really enjoyed a few things added that pay homage to TNG storylines. Some real pleasent surprises. This is easily the best release so far.

Nah, playing Borg is fine, but like I said, their research tree in not a priority. I can't see the point of playing Borg, but that by no means others cant. Some may just want to learn Borg capabilities.

We are aware of the problem, solutions are being discussed.