That is the problem.
Black market is all profit and almost zero risks.
I do not understand your opposition to allowing players making money from legal trade.
The problems are that the black market isn't risky enough and players aren't rewarded enough for being really friendly with a faction.
Agreed. Transponder-off smuggling is more exciting, but there's too little reason to do so, because transponder-on black market trade is so safe. Sometimes I wish it wasn't accessible at all with your transponders on.
But there are softer options. If, in case of high suspicion, your ships would get physically searched (causing disruption and lowering CR) instead of just scanned, that would up the stakes. Or if suspicious factions would continuously shadow you with some picket ships while you're in system, that could hinder your operations quite a bit. (Until you lure those watchdogs into a passing pirate fleet, of course.)
Right, yeah - if that's the issue, I think the better solution would be to make it more dangerous, not to make the other alternative more equivalent to it - that seems less interesting. The "physical search" idea - with the option to refuse, of course - sounds interesting!
If you scale to 200% (or 300%), there's no need for anti-aliasing - it already looks good, because it's double the amount of pixels, so the scaling algorithm has an easier time. For example, a line that's 1 pixel wide becomes 2 pixels wide, etc. If you scale to, say, 180%, a line 1 pixel wide becomes 1.8 pixels wide - which, of course, isn't a thing - and antialiasing is required to make that look reasonably good.
Just to make sure: What keeps me from scaling to 200% (if my screen resolution is smaller than that) is that it would cut off the UI at the top and bottom, because it doesn't move, right?
Yeah. The way scaling works is it well, scales the screen by that amount. So if you were to scale 1440 by 2x, you'd get 720 - which is below the minimal-supported 768p.
@Alex
I would like to weigh in on the colony size discussion.
First of all, I completely understand, that the changes won't really affect the mechanics and the balance of power. So I'm not very interested in changing your mind at all.
However, I think many commentators simply don't understand why some players complain about this change, including maybe you. They don't necessarily complain about the change in the balance of power. Many of them see this limit (^6) doesn't make sense in-fiction-wise. Although for you, it makes the world more believable, for them it makes it less believable.
I think I can see the reason. Because it's on the edge of being possible/impossible.
...
I see what you're saying, yeah. My counter-point is that for me, 10^6 is very much already stretching the bounds of believability, especially in the timeframes involved.
Domain Derelicts would be much better early game zombie-like enemies than pirates, IMO. Track them back to their spawners (probes), nests (survey ships), and finally to the origins (motherships), eliminating the threat.
Mechanically, sure! But that has a very different feel ("fight off a von neumann swarm") from the very start of the game that colors the entire experience and backstory in ways I don't like. And, really, pirates could function much the same way; there's nothing stopping that, I don't think? And they already to do some extent; bases etc.
EDIT: When you hit the level cap, does the experience needed to get Story Points level out? Or does the exp needed still increase?
EXP levels out.
(Yep, correct!)