a) Right now it's not a priority. And doing 3D battles would need a lot of effort (first I'd need models, then I'd have to implement the whole thing). Unfortunately the community is mostly dead, so there is little chance of help there.
b) see a) - also keep in mind this is just an unofficial discussion. There is an official discussion, but only in german in the german BotE forums.
c) I suck at designing stuff, and this is the best I came up with. If you have a better idea for a texture (right now it's basically a white rounded rectangle with a yellow tint applied), I'm all open.
d) no need, my reward is the positive feedback ;).

I understand, though who knows with this android release maybe the community will pick up in force like some did (King of Dragon Pass for example comes to mind, becoming much more renowned after the android port, even becoming a success story after an initial flop). Though 4x communities are usually a bit smaller unfortunately.

In regards to the research tool tip texture, I was thinking maybe something along the lines of the tutorial pop up window just scaled down to the same dimensions of the current rectangle you use. Not sure if possible ... if not maybe a small picture cut from some of the darker backgrounds, just brainstorming as I don't know the parameters you need to use.
If a specific picture/dimension needs to be used and the above options don't work, maybe I can also try building up something. I'm far from being a designer myself but I can try building something up if it would help.

In principle it can be any texture, but of course the font color will have to be adapted as well. I will first implement all tooltips like this, and then when I have a better idea, I'll just swap out the texture.

Until then I wonder if this would be better (Black background with Red/Yellow string)?

Try a shade of grey instead of flat out black, will contrasts much better with the quite dark backgrounds you use. Needs to be dark enough the yellow will still be readable though.

Since we're talking colors actually, some of the races color is almost indistinguishable from the background. Makes it hard to read the planet names and even to see where they have sectors owned.

Edit: Solution to the sectors owned might be a brighter border instead of just the fill in. As for the planet names, I guess color change to contras a bit better will do the trick.

I agree that some of the racial colors need revising. For example the Cartare color is almost unreadable combined with the lens flare on the system build screen. Or maybe I should make the background a touch darker.

But back to the immediate issue at hand. Does this look better?

In the original tooltips are even worse... They use a black background with a grey/light grey font.

I think it does indeed.

On the text color - I noticed for the tutorial you implemented a font based per race, maybe something similar could work for the tool tips as well: title could be in white / the body text in race color).

This way I think it would be more integrated with the other text info in the game (for example the text to the left of the screen).

Hmm I for one would have voted for the first one with the black background. With grey it seems a bit out of place to me, especially for the races with darker themes (like romulan/rotharians).

Well, the dark background goes well with the racial colors. How about a black 90% opaque background. So just a small hint of transparency like this.

This is great! It captures the feel and keeps it as well integrated with the rest of the game.

Yay, well, I'll push these out at some point. But I still want to add more tooltips :).

Yup, this one looks like a winner to me as well.

Update is out with some fixes. Now maybe the PC version should also get some love from me. Or maybe cloud saves. But first I need to play more to test it ;).

Updated PC version too to the latest version. If no major bugs appear there won't be no more updates until the new year. Check OP for details.

Yupyyy, thank you again! I just got myself a windows tablet to be mobile but still play some of the older tbs games ... so updating the windows version as well is great news for me.
I was just wondering yesterday if I should get an android emulator to enjoy the newer version on the tablet as well, but you somehow read my mind :D

Thank you for the Christmas present and wish you as well a nice holiday with your loved ones! :)

Enjoy and happy gaming! Btw tooltips on the windows tablet probably won't work without a mouse. Because for the desktop they appear only on mouse hover.