Thx for the banner, it's really cool!

A couple of changes to the game so far.  

First of all, the game will take place mostly in the Whirlpool Galaxy.  This does mean changing a little bit of the story setting, but I finally decided that I wanted the story to be somewhat realistic, and chances are a star system close enough to the Solar System (with life on it) would have been discovered by now.  The Milky Way Galaxy will still be a major part of the story, so of course I'll explain how people get from one galaxy to the other.

Secondly, we're going to rewrite the engine slightly so that buildings are part of the tilemap.  It all of a sudden occured to me that with buildings on the tilemap, 24 buildings on screen at once will not slow the game down, unlike what we've been doing before.

Also I think storing the buildings on map is a good idea, providing it won't become too much of an hassle to detect each of them from all their sides.

Detecting them in terms of normal collision is not going to be an issue.  Weapons collision is going to be slightly tricky, although I have a general idea of what I want to do there.

Sadly, making buildings part of the tilemap means people who are 12 years old won't always be able to design their own tilesets...what I mean is, there's some specific instructions pertaining to the tileset that can only be understood by people who know what they're doing.  This is meant not just for buildings, but to provide a fast "fog of war" as well.

Personally I don't think age matters, because I remember  I got members who were 12 who were way smarter than the rest of the userbase and I know people who are 30 who barely even know how to turn ON a computer. However, I agree it might make it harder to edit tilesets for some people. I think it would be nice once the editor is released to write some doc later on how to use it. Just one thing, though: I hope it will not me command prompt based

The user creates a tileset as a bitmap, and the map editor (not command prompt) takes care of the rest.  As for documentation, the only people who won't know understand how to do the tileset are those who speed-read through the manual.  It's like my ASM lessons...those who actually read it understood it, but it's not for those who just skim through the pages.

Will it also be Linux/Mac compatible? We have more of those OS users here nowadays it seems.

Shoot, I'm afraid not, unless Mac and Linux can handle Visual Basic .NET programs.  Both people who volunteered program in Visual Basic.

Well, since Visual Basic is .NET, Mono should let it run on Mac and Windows.

No, rather it allows the running of .NET (and only .NET) executables on other platforms. (This is able to be done because of how .NET executables are structured.)
As for Wine, Wine Is Not an Emulator

I have some good news and some bad news.  The good news is, I should have a screenshot this week, showing buildings under construction with a build time (not just built instantly).

The bad news is, the campaign designer will no longer allow customized AI Factions in terms of completely different ships and buildings.  You can still choose how hard you want your AI to be, but you won't be able to design your own AI.  I apologize, but with the new engine and trying to create speed, the game would become too complicated to program with adding custom factions.