Frogboy,
If you want us to "read up on the Vault dev journal" it would be nice to get a link or directions to the Vault dev journal. It may be obvious to you, but to those of us doing testing out in the hinterlands, it is not. On the other hand, doesn't it seem inefficient to have multiple places to have to go to post comments and get responses?
When you say "they automatically get more XP and each level adds a 'slot' that you can place a special item into" how is that any different that what happens today? After a successful attack 1 or more ships in the fleet gets XP and, possibly, a 'slot' to put an upgrade into. Are you saying that the user interface will change or are you saying the way of earning XP will change? Our concern today is that ships are earning a HUGE amount of XP that can allow them to add multiple ship upgrades after a single attack. The example in my previous post where I gave a DropBox link to a save that demonstrates this issue shows that all 20 ships in the attacking fleet earned about 4 'slots' each after attacking a single I.R.S. Cloud. By any reasonable measure that cannot be what you intended to occur.
P.S. It is nice to see you responding to posts in this forum. It can sometimes seem that the feedback and suggestions we take the time to provide to you so that the game can be improved are ignored or dismissed. Especially when version after version comes out without fixing some of the most critical bugs that we have reported. Yes, spelling and grammar errors need to be fixed, but lock-ups and crashes are vital to be fixed. The reason I spend so much time playing these Alpha versions of the game is that I think you have a tremendous game concept and I want to contribute to making it as good as it can be before the final version is released to the public.
End of rant.