Jonttu: Yea it might be that I'm forgetting something or missed some details regarding the EMG+merc vs Guardian thing. Maybe I had one or two officers with damage bonuses or something.
I do distinctly remember 1 battleship taking out the shield on one side of the Guardian by self-destructing. I think it did between 140 and 150 damage. Anyways I can't remember exactly. It also didn't have a quantum detonator on it.
I know there's the patch update notes and everything but it isn't so easy to compare VDC stats and gameplay changes to non-VDC but anyways...
Regarding that link to depth386 and what the mod is like, thanks a lot! This mod is basically exactly what I'm looking for! I have to test this mod out. The creator at least seems to want to address the exact same grievances I have with other mods or stock MoO2 (or whatever you call it, vanilla? unmodded MoO2? standard MoO2?) So that is GREAT news!
Can you read and respond to the other stuff in my post when/if you have the time?
Thanks a lot.

Rocco.40: BB exploding for 140-150 damage sounds about right. However the ICE Guardian can soak up to 300 damage on a side.... something wrong with distinct memory, I'd say. :)
Didn't respond to the other stuff coz I had not much constructive to say about it, but since you ask explicitly:
- No clue what's the improvement of a flat pop growth over current system.
- No-production-stockpiling is not a good idea. If you had proposed halting of a production item that keeps stored production, and when switching back you continue from where you halted it, then it would be something. Plain loss of production is just terrible. It makes the game less fun and promotes risk aversion. Also, I guess under your system you should abolish buying a product with money too, since money also acts as a form of stored production in MOO2, just not localized like stored PP's.
- Spying system you describe resembles that of MOO1, which had aging of reports. Dunno why devs decided not to implement it in MOO2, it would have been nice indeed, but it's not in there.
Thanks a lot for the response, you make some good points.
-The improvement of a flat pop growth (when it comes to how
the amount of population on the colony affects population growth on it) would be for people like me who don't really enjoy the finetuning and number crunching when it comes to optimizing the management of the empire (pop growth, job switches, build list organizing, managing the amount of androids to produce and where,
and in this case especially, population transfer between colonies.) I prefer concentrating on more intuitive stuff rather than moslty pure arithmetic.
-Your solution to have multiple item-specific stockpiles is immersive and I'm totally fine with a compromise like that. That sounds even better I'd say. Great idea.
Also good point that it would reduce the high risk/high reward playstyle too, you're probably right about that.
I disagree when it comes to the money aspect, as that is a unique strength of a "money race" and that is also a playstyle or race type that should be a thing. The cost of buying something from 0 is also much less efficient economically than taking advantage of the default universal stockpile. Other than that, there is a lot of similarities superficially function- or playstylewise (or managementwise), but in practice it's a different thing.
-Is there any way of making some of that work in MoO2. Maybe just 1 spy for report info with 10 turn delay and 2 for 5 turn delay. Also I think a better thing would be if the delay was between
up-to-date reports instead of between the report and the timeliness of the report, which was my previous suggestion. So instead of you getting a report every turn that's 10 or 5 turns old, you would get an up-to-date report every 10 or 5 turns.
Fundamentally the intention behind these suggestions has to do with 2 things. One is to minimize management and optimization in the management of the empire without sacrificing too much variety in the strategic gameplay, more like the opposite. The other is to shorten the turns, at least when it comes to optimizing the output of production, research, tax income, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera...
I hope but I guess only you know whether these things are implementable into a mod, hopefully so. Thanks a lot anyways.
EDIT: Actually I did have the same idea regarding the age-of-the-report thing previously, it's just that I included the ability of getting an up-to-date report every turn with 3 spies that I wanted to get rid of.
Also now that I think about it, I'm kind of second guessing my acceptance of your argument regarding how removing the pp stockpile entirely would impoverish the gameplay by reducing the usefulness of risky playstyles. However, maybe if it doesn't mean turning to producing trade goods or housing right until the last turn you need to have a battleship ready for example, never needing smaller ships or whatever then maybe. However I actually don't know why this would be bad even if riskier playstyles, when it comes to producing stuff, were not a thing. I would be interested in trying it out. I don't see the problem.
Not to mention that this is mostly a singleplayer game anyways, at least for me, and abusing the ability to load a saved game whenever you have risked something and lost greatly because of it, makes the whole thing kind of moot.