Greetings Commanders,
I have a passel of new tricks, features, exploits, and cheats to unload, and this set seems like the most fun.

1) Ian (Traceroute) showed me that a player can have bombers set to depopulate an enemy planet in the next year, AND have waypoint zero orders to drop colonist without any loss. This saves you a colonising ship, and there are no enemy colonists or defences operated to diminish your occupation force.

2) Ed (LittleEddie) demonstrated how this can be used to confuse the enemy. The last year a defending player controls a planet there are (x)colonist and (y)defences. When trick number 1 is used, Stars! will ignore the fact that the home team was killed by bombing and guess the number (z) of invaders required to take the planet based on PRTs, number of defending colonists (before bombing), and % defence coverage (also before bombing). This leaves the routed player with reports that the planet is held by �(z) enemy forces. Such can be used to great effect with a few nearly empty transports, such that their capacity is near the spoofed (z).

3) This is not the only scenario where the client will guess the number of enemy colonists on a planet (denoted by the �). One way to improve your intel in these cases is to create a second folder for your xy and m files, but leave out the h file. YMMV, but it will give you a leg up.

Good Luck,
NH