Hi everyone, first off I just wanted to say that I'm enjoying the game so far; no show stopping problems yet, though I do have some feedback.

For starters, the jump in difficulty between the Unfair AI and the next one up (Cruel I think) is downright staggering.  The cruel AI seems to be cheating in ways I don't even think there is a counter for.  I've been playing since the original game, and regularly take on multiple Unfairs;  The cruel AI had wiped me out in under 20 minutes.  They had novalith cannons before a human player could have even built the research labs for it, while simultaneously managing to put up 4 lvl 4 capital ships supported by an armada of frigates and high level cruisers.  Looking at the stats screen, my economy was comparable to the other factions, so how they managed to pull that off, I don't know.  I'd really like to see a challenging AI that still plays by the same rules I have to.

There also seems to be an issue with the path-finding for AI ships sending them out into deep space.  It's not new to Rebellion, though it has become more severe.  In one of my games one of the AI's titans somehow got out of the map entirely(focusing the view on it just gave a black screen without the titan or anything else besides the GUI).  That's a problem in itself, but as a result it also locked up the entire AI.  It's ships just sat there like they were waiting for the titan to form up and jump.  It was rather disappointing, as that was one of the stronger enemy players.

This is more of an annoyance than an issue, but when playing on one of the larger maps such as huge-random, the number of mines on the map late game is beyond tedious.  I'd really like construction frigates to clear enemy mines from their gravity well.  Automatically.  I can't tell you how obnoxious it is to be forced to clean up enemy mines every time you take a planet, or to loose civilian ships to them.  It gets bad enough that I'll often just send one of my tankier ships into the minefield to detonate the mines; a better option would be much appreciated.

Lastly, the game has a tendency to spend several minutes returning to the main menu from the stats screen.  I know this is sort of already listed as a known issue, but I've been having problems with this since the original game.  The game almost never crashes, however I regularly have to wait 5+ minutes before the main menu loads.  It seams to get worse on higher graphics settings/higher end systems, and with longer games, suggesting that the game is trying to do resource cleanup.  Still, I can't figure out what the game is doing during that time, as it's use of system resources is negligible.  I have several friends who have played the previous games on systems just above minimum specs and go from stats to main menu in less than 5 seconds, yet my gaming rig takes over 5 minutes.  I'm running a 6 core processor and the game is installed on a SATA 6.0Gb/s SSD!  WTF?!