Yeah, from September to November last year I had to work almost every Saturday, and the weekends I didn't work I was completely mentally blasted and couldn't do much more than inch forwards with VBAM.
I had time to work on things starting again in December and January, however, and have made some very good progress on a new version of Galaxies/Rebirth that we can look at running a public playtest of in early March.
I need to play through another 2-3 years of my current solo playtest to get a good feel for any remaining rules that need to change in the current alpha draft. I am testing diplomacy and intel changes, a few tweaks to economy and construction, and making sure that the game progression feel right with those changes in place.
I've also started work on a mission/agenda based replacement for the NPE rules that combines idea from With a Purpose with a very basic relationship shift system similar to the 1E rules, but less time intensive. The goal is that the neutral systems on the map will still be a bit unpredictable diplomatically, but also have clearly defined goals for what they want to do. I've run into two neutrals in my playtest game. One of them rolled a military agenda and decided they wanted to go raid their neighbor. The other rolled that they wanted to improve Productivity in their systems.
I'm attempting to flesh out those goals/agendas to make them a bit more versatile, but at that point as a CM you'll be able to tell what the neutral powers want to do. Meanwhile, the relationship shifts will tell you if they want to improve or degrade relations with a random neighbor -- which in turn gives you a diplomatic objective to go with whatever else they may have rolled up.
The NPE that rolled the military object also happened to start with a Precursor Heavy Cruiser (derelict) in their home system.
