I’m sure the numbers will drop Bully, they did in Uni 37 when I played there a while (with Salaas and a few others). The player count didn’t drop far enough to spoil the game though, and there was still that ‘rush’ of eventually getting the tech for Battleships/Plasmas/IRN etc that is missing from Uni 2 now … got em all, nothing to aim for apart from bigger fleet or bigger mines 
too early to say on the new design, good points and bad points IMO, any failings will probably show up when the ‘overview’ screen starts getting busier though … like 4 attacks and 2 transports out at the same time - apparently it can get ‘laggy’ (reading a few posts from the other redesign Unis)
planet sizes are limited to 250 fields max, and you need ‘Astrophysics’ tech to colonise planets too, so a couple of obvious differences to start with 
