On a completely separate note, you might want to examine the size of the instant-build pool for new games. I don't know exactly how you tend to approach the "balance" of new games, but I used about 25% of the points before I noticed that I had 300k tons of military ships and only 150k tons of maintenance capacity. Perhaps ships are cheaper than expected (the cheaper fuel tanks perhaps, or just because of the low tech level), or perhaps there are just too many points given out. Hard for me to say which. Another idea might be to allow us to spend those points on infrastructure, so that we could decide between a few extra research labs and just a few ships or a few extra maintenance facilities to support more ships.
I was just thinking of posting this. There are a
vast number of "Fast OOB" points at game compared to VB6. I found the VB6 default Fast OOB points to be at a perfect sweetspot for letting you get out your initial survey ships, a few freighters, and some corvettes, while coaxing you into getting your shipyards up and running. In C#, you can build much greater tonnage by default. Like, absurdly greater.
Perhaps the default Fast OOB points should be decreased to just 25% of its current default value for new game race creation?