There are some nice changes here. I recognized some of them from Horemvore's mods and some of them from my mods. Some of our mods are similar because we think alike in some areas. I use only 2 of his UCP mods because I prefer my way of doing things. However, I use some of his changes in my mods, and he uses one of my mods. I originally did the player spacing mod and gave him permission to use it because so many players were complaining about races starting so close together.
When Retribution was released I noticed a tendency for the races to sometimes be closer together that before, so I have been experimenting with new values. I haven't decided which are best, but I'm currently using these:
<PlayerStartSpacingWideMod>0.26</PlayerStartSpacingWideMod>
<PlayerStartSpacingNarrowMod>0.13</PlayerStartSpacingNarrowMod>
AI evaluates foreign influence before determining whether a planet should be colonized.
I hope it's not a simple evaluation, such as "if foreign influence exists, don't settle". I had a game in a 2.8 opt-in version where the Altarians settled a planet in the middle my influence where I didn't have any planets. They have strong influence, and it didn't take too long for their influence to push mine out of the way and begin causing me problems. I hope that situation can still happen with this update.
Fixed typos and grammar errors
This is good.
Added typos and grammar errors
This is not good.
My mods include some that correct some of the many spelling, grammar, punctuation and factual errors as well as some that have confusing text. If you are interested, I can make these available. There are still many other "typos". I don't update these mods very often because I just don't feel like it. I can't seem to gain ground.
I'm going to have to review a lot of my mods to see what I need to update before using this, so I'd better get to it.