Oh, your are working off some things that were going around on the forum for some time. Nice Glad to see the armor buff. The changes to the control scheme make sense, the only thing missing now is a instant fire option. Made up your mind on that yet?
But I?m still hoping we get something to fire guided missiles by only pressing the number key of the weapon group. So an option like auto-fire, but with a different effect.
I did give that a bit of thought. One side effect of the control changes is you can much more easily fire off a missile or two, without extra controls. Say you're firing group 1, and missiles are in group 2 - you just tap 2, then 1, and one missile gets fired w/o any perceptible interruption. Before, doing this was a problem because you'd generally have shift held down and would end up changing autofire settings instead.
Not to say that a "quickfire" mode won't ever become an option, but it's fairly involved coding-wise and - because of the changes - now much less necessary.
Oh, and can we get a screenshot of the UI redesign?
It still needs a few graphical assets. At that point, I was thinking of writing a blog post about it, depending on the timing of when that happens.
Are there any plans to give AI commanders skill bonuses
Yes, there are long-term plans to do just that, but in what form (and if) it will happen is unclear.
Right, that's most likely going to happen, but not for a little while. It's tied in with "proper" fleet generation, a faction mechanics overhaul, etc.