1. I understand logically that you don't lose or forget tech... unless you are playing a RTS. I do not see what can realistically be done about it though. All the tech trees are theoretically balanced, so once you have one researched, you don't even need the rest of them. Thus, you get one done pretty quick and no more research needed. Rest of the game becomes trivial when I can immediately equip Photon Torpedoes and Energy Gat PDs.
He would have to rebalance the entire game based upon techs being immediately available. He just is not going to do that. Too much work for the sake of appeasing the logic issue which most RTS also ignore. Granted some of them cover this up by requiring certain buildings or energy or whatever, or upgrading your buildings to be able to do the tier 2 and tier 3 research. But its the same thing.
We might someday get an XP item that allows us to start with the first tier of a given research tree. It might also be interesting if certain SECTORs gave you campaign bonuses, such as the above. It would give a reason to hit certain sectors and not others, and hold onto them.
2) Note that you can Save an enemy ship and reuse them for that battle. A persistent save would be kind of cool though and it would work great with this idea. Now that human ships are better, there is less reason to create alien vessels. But, I DO love the pokeman "collect them all" mentality of it. :-)
The only issue is that you might eventually find some really GOOD ships that could make the game easier. (i.e. loaded up with advanced weapons and at a good price point where humans don't have much. (the 2k and 4-5k and 8-10k marks).
3) I agree that marines would likely die during combat, but I don't think this really adds much to the game, for him to spend time implementing a random crew death type situation.
4) Agreeed.... more content is king.
edit: sorry, had it quoted wrong.
