Mesophon Issues

- Mesophon sells all ship classes. This means you can buy ramjets in clearspace and starships in nebulas.

- Only being able to buy ships in groups of 1000 is very inconvenient.

- Mesophon worlds have the same defenses as independent worlds, so players capture them regularly. Mesophon will eventually be destroyed in every game. Maybe when players abdicate or are destroyed, some of their forces could defect to Mesophon.

- Mesophon will still happily trade with players who attack Mesophon planets.

- Mesophon hubs are linked but don't seem to actively exchange resources with one another because no resource planets supply the network (hubs can't exchange resources that they aren't being supplied). Mesophon planets don't seem to try to increase their planetary defense allocations to take advantage of resources sold to them by players. The resources just sit on the planet. Players who take Mesophon worlds get any resources on the world, so it can be a tactically smart move to raid a Mesophon planet, take all the hexacarbide, and sell it to another Mesophon planet.

- Mesophon planets with "trace" trillum reserves can revolt and go independent early on in the game. I think this might happen to hub-designated planets with native TLs <3 (they increase to TL 5 and suffer durable goods resource shortages, resulting in revolts) and for planets with very high natural TLs (chronic resource shortages).

- Mesophon had one of its sector capitals either secede or get captured and then secede (Beta I). This resulted in a similar-looking AI empire that didn't buy or sell resources. Iota Alshain Society appeared right after the beta started and lasted almost a year. If this was caused by secession rather than capture, it might be because Mesophon starts with a nonzero secession risk due to having >2 sector capitals, which is more than is permitted under T&E.

- Mesophon worlds are dangerous to have near your empire- gigantic fleets from any player can emerge out of them with no warning. (Maybe Mesophon could send purchased ships as AI fleets from the hub to a player's nearest world in real time rather than making them instantly controllable.)

- Mesophon is subject to the no-capital bug, just like players. This occurred in Beta I.

- Mesophon will buy resources through trade routes in arbitrarily large amounts, so even the biggest resource stockpiles can be instantantly turned into AEs and ships by T&E players if they can link a captured world to a trade hub by setting the Mesophon trade route to import millions of tons per watch.

- AEs don't undergo attrition, even though just about everything else in the game is subject to it, including many of the resources that can get exchanged for AEs. This may end up being a balance issue in later versions.

- It would be nice if players could buy resources from Mesophon that are being supplied to the network by other players. This would in turn necessitate some kind of self-correcting mechanism for Mesophon to relink its hubs if the network gets severed through player mischief (maybe Mesophon could maintain a fleet that tries to either retake lost hubs or take over another nearby independent planet to re-establish a connection if the chain gets broken.)

Secession and Warlord Empire Issues

- It's difficult to distinguish secession empires (formed by sector capital secession) and warlord empires from inactive player empires.

- Attacking secession empires imposes social order penalties as normal, even for the player whose empire they seceded from.

- Secession and warlord empires never auto-abdicate and last essentially forever since they're too small for most players to attack without penalty.

- Secession and warlord empires are economically crippled (they do not establish trade routes, designate, or raise planet TLs) and don't seem to do anything interesting like deploy fleets or attack planets.