Just make ships immune to atmospheric burnup, radiation, and collision damage while being flown by an AI helmsman. Make sure to give those things new damage types that aren't used by anything else so that ships don't become immune to lasers or something while being piloted by the AI.

Occasionally getting stuck to the surface of something during a lag spike is a small price to pay for not hemorrhaging ships and time to celestial bodies.

I am unable to attack a city because of an unfinished military HQ building, which both provides invulnerability and also prevents flags from being planted, but also cannot be destroyed (or completed, even, which I also tried).

I could understand if the game was just vaguely biased against warfare or something, but this is getting ridiculous.  We finally catch this guy online and he is still invincible.

edit:
An associate suggested C4, no effect other than blowing big craters into the construction site.

I have encountered cities decaying while being on my avatars land list two separate times now.

it seems like visiting them is the only thing that keeps cities safe right now.

Haxus, the ship designer is too complicated. I personally do not have the time to learn a new method on how to design ships. The old method was as easy as painting. My primary concern is the difficulty of designing the hulls and interiors and less so the internal modules like sensors and weapons.

I would suggest a secondary easy mode akin to the old painting style along side the 3D designer mode, with a choice between the two.

This is practically the only thing stopping me from playing the game because I used to love designing ships so much. Nowadays it is too much of a hassle. I could not in good conscience recommend designing things to anyone else in its current state.

A bug caused one or more servers to crash over the past few days. The bug was due to the noncombatant state of NPCs. That bug was fixed.

Load on the servers has continued to be my number one concern this week. I know there are other bugs that need attention but this one is the highest priority.

I made some giant strides toward smoothing out the servers today. Thanks for your patience if you waited through the many server restarts today. That should be all for today.

The largest contributor to the lag was due to a read/write lock on a data structure that was getting locked for write too often. The code was improved to be smarter about when to lock that lock for write.

Here is a little background about read/write locks. They are used to control access to a resource in a multi threaded environment.

Many threads can access a resource simultaneously when they lock the read/write lock for read access. The lock allows many threads to lock it for read at the same time.

However, when a thread must have exclusive access to the resource, the lock must be locked for write. Only one thread can lock the read/write lock for write at the same time. The locking thread waits for all current locks to be unlocked before the write lock is granted.

While a read/write lock is locked for write, any other thread attempting to lock the lock will wait until the write lock is unlocked.

When associating a barrier with the closed state of a door, for instance to have a door in the middle of a room void that still has collision, the barrier stays associated with the door for the entirety of that designing session. It is not dissociated by saving, refreshing obstruction model, or previewing. Upon loading the design the barrier will no longer be associated and will not have any collision at all until it is re-associated with the door, regardless of refreshing the obstruction model.

Hazeron ships and Cities should generate and be required to manage heat.

Ships:

• Generate heat as a function of power usage per system with some systems have higher heat generation ratios than other ie Life support create "Negative heat" while ftl or sheild generate a considerable amount 
  
• Heat can be passively dissipated using the square cube law this will provide a system to penalize super massive ships while creating a niche for smaller ships
  
• The previous passive disapation would be impacted by the environment when the ship is in frigid atmo the most loss would occur with habitable being the middle and space the least amount of loss inferno would cause heat gain and liquids would have an even more pronounced effect
  
• Passive heat loss would not work when sheild were raised and instead a heat sink module would be required to store the heat when it becomes full the ship would start taking heat damage. Fuel or cryozine could be jettisoned to instantly delete heat from the ship
  
• The more heat a ship has the bigger it's sensor profile making it easier to spot from farther away this would be ships with super good heat magement or even negative heat accumulation would be hidden from sensors 
  

• Cities that are at 90% of the current world volume limit should start generating heat 
  
• Heat can be dissipated with special buildings that dump it into the ocean or atmosphere (if there is one) this would creat a hard limit for atmosphereless moons
  
• Each heat dissipation building should only cause a morale penalty (assuming changing a planets climate is impossible)
  
• The "hotter" a city the more visible on sensors (this would replace the power usage mechanic) it would make big powerful empires more difficult to hide
  

I created a new acct and downloaded the game to my laptop. Everything went well till I try to create a gen III character, at which point I get kicked to desktop.

intel i7 11800h, 2.3 GHz (16 cpu's)

GForce 3080

I explored several systems that I wanted to revisit later, but the starmap cant filter for them (it can for other empires).

This is an annoying and rather huge setback.  In the future I will simply manually spreadsheet everything I find however this should probably work in the first place, currently the only purpose the starmap seems to be serving is to give you the false impression that it is saving information when in fact it is either inaccessible in the case of resources or will seemingly outright vanish in the case of cities.

Undiscovered empires without warp can be detected on brokers. This may depend on their default stance (eg, friendly).