I've played my save all day nearly but have failed to achieve anything because for some reason or another the game has quit without saving, once to deleting a custom hull variant while it's still in use and once to a crash however the annoying ones are twice to accidentally quitting to main menu from a pursuit instead of allowing the remaining enemies to retreat unharmed (or whatever that says).
I know that this could be avoided by saving more often and reading things before pressing buttons but in my opinion as the enemy is already retreating the default option should be to allow the remaining ships to escape without problem and allow me to keep the wreck of any cargo ship I blew up (the number of barely escorted atlas' I see at command and control
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Another suggestion I've seen that would help would be to change iron mode to automatically save at regular intervals/conditions, possibly before moving to engage, at the end of any combat scenario (i.e. when you press leave) and exiting a station screen.
"Auto safe before battle in Iron Mode", topic=7990.0