Sirian: I'll check into the first one. I'm not sure why the population would still be attached to the colony or transport ships, because it's supposed to dump the population back into the system.
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The distinction you are drawing does not exist. Rather, the game behaves as if both cases are true: the planet is full (all people merged) for all planet-related issues, but the ships are full if attacked.
A typical AI system will have two colony ships and two to three transports just sitting around. Say there are three planets in the system with 20 billion people each. If that system is targetted by a "sneak attack", each colony ship (in orbit) that is destroyed will reduce the system population by about 25%. Two colony ships killed off thus kills off nearly HALF the population in the system. Transports killed off after that can take it down by another 5 billion each. That same system that started with 60bil can have as few as 15 billion left after killing five or six ships in orbit. This is warships attacking systems with colony ships and transports in orbit. No invasion yet. In fact, invasion is not even possible until orbitting ships are destroyed. Thus the amount of troops needed to invade is almost always a lot less than it should be.
People on the planets are treated as if they were loaded onto the colony ships and transports in orbit, and wiped out BY THE BILLIONS, which makes no sense. This breaks the AI, which insists on parking several colony ships and transports in orbit around every system "to have them ready in case needed", but in actuality just to act as deathtraps for their own people
game after game after game.
This flaw renders AI's way too easy to take down, including by other AI's. As soon as any AI gains a full space superiority advantage, the war is over, because they'll decimate the enemy population and production base by reaching the enemy planets and killing all the colony ships and transports in orbit.
Please fix it. It's broken.
As for the second, we are aware of it and it is on the to do list.
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Thank you.
Looking forward to trying out improved versions.
Are you saying that any race can research the alignment restricted techs, or that they can trade for them? If it's the latter, that's easily fixed by not letting those techs show up in the trade list if you can't research them yourself.
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Not letting them show up in the trade list would be a great start! That still does not address the full issue, though. There's more to it. I'm not sure you realize just how easy it is to change alignment in GalCiv.
Player can send colony ships with 1 mil colonists (essentially empty) to low PQ planets to trigger additional morality events, then abandon the colony at no additional cost. Many events move morality by only 1 point, some by 3 to 5 points, but the big ones offer 10 point swings. You only need eight or nine of those to go from 0 to 100, or vice verse.
I don't see how you could stop this without the cure being worse than the disease, though, so please do not misunderstand me! I'm not asking you to stop the alignment swing. There are ways I can think of, but they all break legitimate colonization, and that's not worth your time. Instead, I propose that you reduce the value attached to wide swings of alignment. Essentially, the unintended consequences should be addressed. Make alignment a real choice, with change still possible, but the benefits of alignment applying only if you STAY that alignment.
Many of the top ranked players start by leaning evil, gaining all the planetary bonuses for their own worlds, and gaining access to the evil-specific techs. Then when they have gotten all the important evil techs, they swing all the way back to good and grab all of those, too. Most are doing this for the score, since scoring is so highly dependent on wonders. Some are choosing all evil opponents, so they get the benefit of easy relations at first on top of it all, then when they have firm alliances with any significant rivals (alliance which the AI can't ever break) they swing back to good, and pick up all the benefits of being good on top of what they had, PLUS they get bonus score for ending the game "opposite alignment" of all the evil opponents. It's a big sham, in effect, gaining credit (score) for what you intended to be the most difficult scenario, but what in practice is merely a milk run most of the time.
Rather than remove the ability to change alignment on a dime (especially on the largest maps, where there is a huge supply of junk planets to trigger as many morality events as player desires), instead enforce the alignment benefits. Let the benefits apply only if player's alignment continues to match that associated with the tech. Then the ability to change alignment on a dime would no longer offer nonsensical rewards.
And even if player does not exploit extra free shots at planetary morality events, it's still easy enough to change alignment from 0 to 100 on a huge or gigantic map over the course of the game. Settling PQ12-14 for legitimate reasons triggers more events, plus a longer game played out across the full tech tree sees many time-triggered morality events, too. The junk planet loophole merely brings the same result more quickly.
vincible: I'm not certain that it should be changed so that you can't use a tech if your alignment changes. You still know how to use it. There's nothing magical that would make a civ forget how to build deathknights if they suddenly started doing good deeds.
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With all due respect, you are missing the point on this one. Alignment-based techs are not a matter of knowledge, but of the morality involved. Death Knights do not have morality attached to them, but The Better Way does, and so does Master Race.
Take the case Vincible cited, of The Dark Side. Can only evil research into the dark side? Functionally, yes, within the game, but practically no. In real life, if such a science existed, anyone with the prerequisite breakthroughs could look into it. Yet only evil civilizations would CHOOSE to spend their resources researching how to construct an artifact into which to feed live people for the benefit of murdering them to gain their "life force power" as an energy source, akin to electricity. Only an evil civilization would research that, only an evil civilization would build it, and only an evil civ would continue to use it once it was built. If the civ stopped being evil, it would shut the thing down.
The same is true for good-alignment techs. Cure for Depression, for example. Only a good civ would spend its resources looking into this technology, and whatever the "cure" turned out to be, only a good civ would continue to spend the resources to fund the ongoing cure.
Only a good civ would be ABLE to "xeno persuade" other civs into accepting more trade, while only an evil civ would resort to "xeno intimidation". The two of these are mutually exclusive right on the face of it! How could they possibly be in use at the same time? They would cancel each other out if any civ tried, yet in the game as it now stands, both may be used if you have the tech. I see this as faulty on both counts: it makes no sense to the context of the game, and it is unbalanced as a strategy, too.
If changing alignment allows players to chase down rewards and scoring bonuses, a lot players will do that. If sticking to one alignment "penalizes" the player compared to treating alignment as one more game element to exploit, to extract extra bonuses and score from flopping alignment all over the map, what are players going to do? And how are "average" players going to feel about "top" players making use of this? If you can address it without breaking normal game function, isn't that worth your effort?
Good civs would not choose to do evil, and evil civs would not be able to fool anybody into believing they were good, to be able to benefit from good techs.
Thus it is not about knowledge, but about alignment. That any alignment can acquire and use, or continue to benefit from, any tech in the game, defeats the whole purpose of alignment-based tech, in my view.
If not for the easy ability to change alignment almost at will, then removing alignment-based tech from the trade screen (as you offered) would be good enough. However, we can change alignment almost at will, especially on large maps. Therefore you should anticipate players being both good and evil in the same game and account for it, by preventing not only research, but construction, and even all forms of benefit of alignment-based effects and improvements, if alignment does not match up. I would even go so far as to say that players should not even gain the scoring benefit of alignment-based wonders and trade goods for which their alignment at game's end no longer matches.
Put some teeth into the choice of alignment. Make the player's CURRENT alignment count for something. Make alignment an ongoing requirement, not just an entry pass to be discarded at player's convenience. Please?
- Sirian
Stardock Forums
Thanks.
game after game after game.
Looking forward to trying out improved versions. 
but overall i would like to say thanks to stardock and the programmers for delivering a great update. i look forward with high intrepidation for the updated version of 1.12. 