Really liking the escort behaviour shown off in them twitter posts, it's kinda like what I was getting at with my old formations suggestion but more organic. I'd still love a way to micromanage the ships escorting my own when that's the case, but this looks to be a definite step up.
I am curious to see how the escorts behave when the group is outnumbered and outgunned.
One of the gifs on twitter shows some of that - an Omen warding off a bunch of frigates. I think overall it'll depend on the specific ships involved and how they all match up; in some cases it'll work well and in some cases probably less so.
Now, adding different/selectable escort behaviour to ships (either as a command or during ship refit) to differentiate between true "escort ships" (ward off flankers, provide fighter/artillery support, etc) and "task force members" (tied to the escorted ship's targeting/engagement behaviour so that they work together as a group to attack) would be an amazing addition 
I think to a degree it's the same thing - i.e. escorting ships will help out vs primary targets situationally, and start warding off etc when there are flankers. But in my mind that's not exactly the same as a task force, where you'd assume multiple ships of the same size would probably work well together, while escort I think works a lot better when the escorting ships are smaller (and faster) or at least considerably faster.
Can we expect the autocombat option when fighting defense of survey ships/abandoned stations?
I don't think so; I'm not a fan of how autoresolve works out as far as what it does to the game. If, let's say, the goal was to prevent the player from having to fight those battles beyond a certain point, I would prefer a different solution that removes those battles entirely.
(I've got half a mind to remove autoresolved pursuits, either, since those get weird in terms of results/incentives/etc, but I don't think I'll touch it for the .1 release, in any case. It's not great but it's also fairly benign.)
Maybe make the queue only 'hold' money for the next upcoming project? since build times are now much slower, when project 2 starts the player can get a colony intel warning "insufficient funds for next order" (if needed) and have 60+ days to fix it with a count down they can look whenever they want (and maybe a 'transfer funds' button to end warning when they feel they have enough extra money for their personal account.
I see what you're saying, I think, but I'd rather keep it simple.
I am very curious about these two ships, because until now Pirates and Pathers had a severe lack of capital ships bigger than the converted Colossus freighters.
https://twitter.com/amosolov/status/1091076592980426753Welcome to the forum, btw!
In fact, will we be seeing more converted ships in the future?
Maybe? Depends on what becomes necessary; e.g. the change to fleet spawning that uses more large ships in larger fleets necessitated adding these two.
And will there be a mechanism for turning things like Buffalo, Colossus and Tarsus freighters into Buffalo Mk. IIs, Colossus Mk. IIs/IIIs and Condors?
Almost certainly not. These have been retconned into being hacks of the base blueprints, rather than post-hull-production modifications, though the backstory ought to remain flexible enough to allow for both as the situation demands. But I don't really see adding this as a player-facing mechanic, while potentially cool, it also seems needlessly complicated - that is, it's not solving any particular design problem.
