Okay so it is a mod thing that's causing it, or at least seems to be.

Away to hunt and see what it could be...

Well it turns out there was a modded weapon animation loose in the mod folder.  I've stunned it and locked it away behind a forcefield for now.  I don't think I put it in the upload, but I'll check anyway.

Yep, all good.  Now to test and make sure. *fingers crossed*

Well, it looks like there's something else wrong in the mod folder.  I'm going to try disabling the new ship components, because that's the most likely place where I could screw something up.

If it's not that, at least I've eliminated that from what could be causing the problem.

Okay so I've narrowed it down to GC2Types.xml (just my luck) which means I'm not the only one who might see the weirdness with the beam weapons.  Going to have to check and see what's going on with the file.

There's a tag <Behaviour> which has got itself turned on.  In the original file these aren't used, except maybe in the older version of the game I'm guessing.

Yet another reason to never never use the supplied editor.  Completely my bad for not spotting it sooner though.

There we go, all fixed.

I'll put out a new version in a bit, just in case anyone else was annoyed by it.

I also noticed that I must have missed PlanetImprovements.xml when I last uploaded.  Huh.  So I think I'll rub out the download for version 5F, just in case it screws something up.

Okay, Fixed version is up.  Let me know if there are any problems with it!

Played a new test game tonight, managed to get myself into the red with the colony rush.  Oops.

Being in the red for too long places you in the precarious position of needing to raise taxes but with approval so low, population growth can slow down quite dramatically, so you can't raise them too high otherwise you'll make things worse.

Things turned around, but the other races have been spamming colonies like crazy while my production and research have been on hold.  Even though I've snagged a nice grouping of 25 or so colonies, it's uncertain how I'll do in the rest of the game.  Yay, a challenge!

The new design for the Arcean tech tree means that I'm able to field some defence fighters with Fusion Beams at about the time that the Terrans start building their military up.  I've got Space Cannons built and the improved Cathedral of Valour in play, which should help if anyone decides to invade.

I've yet to fill in the description for the Fusion Beam.  Huh.  I could swear that I did that.  Oh well.

The newest test game should be fun.  There are some early wars going on, because it's an Immense-sized galaxy I haven't actually met the guys instigating things.

I'm posting a few screenshots of my latest test game on Steam:

http://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198038074163/screenshots/

Test game seems fairly busy tonight.  It's taking sometimes a minute or so to process turns, presumably because of all the fighting.

I think that I have a solution for the Thalan problem.

Basically, what I have done up until now is limit how many money-sucking improvements the Thalans can build.  Now, while that's nice and all, it presents a few problems, notably that it can become impossible to rebuild a particular improvement if an upgraded version of the original is destroyed.

So instead what I will do is relax those restrictions, and give the Thalan manufacturing and technology matrices a lower output and a low maintenance.  But they will get a new, non-upgrading 1pp improvement which boosts the output of a matrix.  Call it a Hyper-Fusion Transformer, if you will.  It will have a high maintenance cost but since there can be only one per planet, the money sucked will be significantly less and the Thalan economy won't collapse like a house of cards.

Well, that's the theory.  I'm anticipating that this will make the Thalans far more dangerous than they already are, as a lot of their manufacturing and research will be bonus rather than base output, allowing them to do it cheaper than anyone else.  Which is kind of par for the course for a race that's from the future.

I will also take a look at the Altarians, Yor, Krynn and Iconians while I'm poking around.

Today I did a major bit of tweaking of the beam weapons.  Their output is going to be higher, for example 18 for Phasors VII and 14 for Disruptors IV.  They will cost a bit more, obviously, but there's going to be more improvement in the cost/space and damage/cost ratios as you move through the tech tree.  This means less instances where you research a new weapon tech and can't seem to fit any more firepower.

I'm also going to look at missile and mass driver weapons in more detail.

Because this is a fairly major change I'm incrementing the version to 6 for the next release of the mod.  It's possible that I will need to beef defences up a little bit, but I'll see when I run a test game.

I've posted the changes to the weapons here if you want to have a look.

I've gone over the planetary improvements and removed the restrictions on some, went ahead and added the Fusion Transformer for the Thalans, and turned the Yor's Research Matrix into a Cybernetic Matrix.

Still have changes to make for Iconians.

Okay then, there's still a few more changes I want to make.

I've turned the power plants into a set of trade goods which modestly improve military and social production.  The upside is that you no longer have to waste a tile on each planet on a building which may later be destroyed.  The downside is, since they are trade goods, anyone who captures the planet can control them.

There are still races which have tile-based production magnifiers, I'm leaving those for now.

Version 6 is up, see top post.

Note that you will need to change the mod folder to get version 6 running, different folder name.

Going to try out a new hull class in my next game.  It's provisionally named 'Support' and will be between small and medium hulls in terms of capacity, cost, logistics and hitpoints.

I'm considering a change to colony module costing.  This will mean it takes longer to produce colony ships, which will somewhat slow down the colony rush.

This is fair to all players and will allow populations to grow for a while longer before another new colony is added, potentially staving off economic meltdown.

Some thoughts about the colony and life support changes.

Changing the colony module cost does seem to slow down the colony rush a bit, to the point where the human player doing some scouting is of some benefit.  On the other hand, sometimes you're still going to be beaten to that sweet high-PQ world.  The early game seems a bit less hectic now.

The basic life support module now takes up an appreciable part of a tiny hull's capacity.  So for long-range scouts you'll probably have to skip sensors and a hyperdrive.  Cargo hulls have more capacity to work with so you can fit a couple of support modules, an engine and a colony or constructor module, but that's it until more research is done.

I'm not sure about the miniature life support modules, I think I made a typo somewhere.  Yeah, fixed now.

Test game I'm playing now, the AI is definitely making use of the new ship class.  Unfortunately though, the Small class seems to be falling out of favour, probably because it has fewer hitpoints.

Unsure what to do with the new Support hull class.  On the one hand, it does spice up the early game, but it makes the original Small hull a bit redundant unless you have a very limited production capability or you want to mass produce a cheap fighter.  It does cost one less logistics point than Support so maybe it will see some use.

I'll keep playing and see how it goes.

Well as it turns out the AI does still use the smaller hull, just not very frequently.  That's good to know.

I think I need to get a bit more radical with changes to life support.  What I'm going to do is return to one support module per tier, but only the small modules.  Basic Life Support will be cut (I will leave it set to require 'ImpossibleTech' in case you want to add it back in).

This means that the AI and player will be unable to add life support modules to ships until General Life Support is researched, so early expansion and exploration will be limited to nearby systems and sectors.

My reasoning here is that it's too easy to just slap a couple of support modules onto an early colony ship and colonise a planet four or five sectors away.  No wonder the AI is rushing to every planet in the known galaxy!

Additionally, while I was playing last night I noticed that the Zylons (they have a close copy of the Yor tech tree) aren't terraforming their planets.  Must be some sort of tech tree issue.  It's holding them back a bit!

In a couple of weeks this mod will be three years old.  Wow, time flies eh?

Still going with my latest test game.  The recent changes to the weapons have been beneficial to my Arceans, who can do a lot of damage in that first round even with just Harpoons and Neutron Drivers.  This leverages their Super Warrior ability, allowing them to take less or no damage from enemies when they get the first attack.

Yeah, I'm actually mixing my weapon types for a change.  Plus, missile modules are quite big, so I sort of need the second weapon type.

I haven't fought any tough opposition in the late stage of the game.  The Drengin are the most powerful, but they're also my ally (I'm -evil- Arceans!) so I've been going after the weaker races and using influence to flip a few colonies away from my rivals.

In the early/mid game though I did have to fight off the Zylons and Altarians (thankfully, not both at the same time) and the space cannons and Cathedral of Valour were pretty useful in staving off ground attacks from the odd transport that got through.  So I think for the most part, my job working on the Arceans is done, apart from filling in some descriptions.

Going to go back to the Zylons/Yor next game and see what needs doing there, apart from obviously getting them to terraform - I might need to make the technology core, or I might just need to pull it out from behind Biological Studies.