Awesome thank you! I will check those out for sure. It’s so great to see devs so interactive and attentive even to a simple question like mine.  I’m going to lose many many hours to this game, and it’s still getting better!

Great to know! I will check those guides out this evening!

Custom ship building was super popular and it even generates a small market. Perhaps the Gal Civ 4 ship builder will be expounded in later versions. I think GalCiv4 should have more options. The developers might just not want to implement them while they are still balancing the basics of the game. I would like to hear a reply from a developer on that. 

@SSStreetFighter - you have more tutorials than I realized.  I'll take a look.  Glad you have plans for more.

I went through and watched all the tutorial videos which was a great help.  I'm ~100 turns into a game currently and find myself with many other questions.

• It appears that when you have a survey ship in your fleet as you explore anomalies, all ships in the fleet get the XP.  Is this accurate?  Is the XP divided equally among them?
• When you research an upgrade, like +10% to beam weapons does it impact your current ships, or only ones made moving forward?  It looks like it does effect everything you have in the field, but not sure if that is intended
• When you research a new weapon, say the Avenger missiles, does the game automatically create an updated version of any ship that came with the previous tech (hypersonic missiles in this case)?  I went to create a new version of a ship using the new ones, but I then noticed the ship that was previously the basic missile ship was now an "M2" version and had the +4 missile attack.  I don't know if I did this somehow playing with the ship editor or if the game does it?  Will it do it for any and all ships that use missiles?
• Is there a way to upgrade your ships currently in the field with the newest weapons? Or do you have to decommission and rebuild? 
• I'm sure I'm doing a lot wrong being a first real playthrough but as mentioned I'm about 100 turns into a game and haven't come across the tech for planetary invasion yet.  Is this right? Is it a end-game deep tech?  Or is my research just trash (about 10-16 turns per tech playing on normal speeds)
• Colony vs Core World - I'm sure everyone has a different opinion but is there a relatively objective point where it's not worth turning a planet into a core world? i.e. tiny planets etc.
• This may be a playstyle question but I'll ask here - is it better to spread quickly and thin (especially if planetary invasion tech is late game) or slowly and build up "deeper"?

Thank you all in advance! I'm loving this game!

XP from fleets with a survey ship do go to all ships in the fleet (not split, each gets the full amount).  Though, I think the survey choices for +10xp go only to the survey ship itself (not 100% sure on that).

The game auto-designs new ships when appropriate new techs are researched.  I generally go in and design my own anyway.

I like to do a quick surge of expansion and then settle in with both military and resources (food/cash), and then repeat.  I think this version of the game should be better for "tall" players than older versions.

The games I've played on the alpha so far have ranged from 200 to about 600 turns.  I've been playing on large or huge map sizes. The shortest wins were with the new Prestige victory, which I think has to be rebalanced some more so that it doesn't happen so soon. Then longest were Ascension victories. I'm sure if I'd gone for a military conquest victory they would have been much much longer, considering that even in my longest games I've never been able to completely explore the map or meet all the AI civs.

Games can go a long time. the default turn limit is 1,000 turns you can actually disable that if you want to play forever. the largest possible map can play 64 civilizations which we don't even have yet I tried playing on a big maps and I couldn't get it to work right now the game seems to crash on larger maps but it never crashes on the smallest size. later updates might fix that. Also you need to have more RAM than whatever the minimum RAM says. They're actually under reporting the minimum RAM requirements I guess because they're afraid that people won't buy the game if they don't have enough RAM. I think they should just be honest. But if it says you require x amount of ram to play that size of map then when you get that much RAM it'll show up in yellow and when you try to play after a couple hundred turns the game will move slow as molasses. I only bought 32 gigs because they said that's what the biggest map needed I would have been happy to buy 64 gigs if I had known it would be useful but yeah right now I can't play the biggest style map because the minimum RAM requirement isn't actually the minimum RAM requirement.

I currently have 32gb RAM and am about 4.25 hours into the game. So 12+ then isn’t unheard of!

Well hopefully I'll be able to play it on a Big Map later then. As long as it works by the end I won't complain. But whatever they recommend should be the amount for it to be green not yellow. 

Does anyone know from a computer science perspective if there are other factors that affect a big map? I have struggled with big maps in civ games since I was a kid. I just learned ram has something to do with it last month. It makes sense now that I think of it. Does anyone know any other factors that a big map might have on a computer?