Thank you very much for that super informative post.
I have one other quick question, about using Open Horizons 2.5. When I start my campaign, there is no option to have custom difficulty settings, there is only the option for easy, normal, hard, and realistic. If I use hard settings, manual targeting is turned off, but I still want to have external view, so would rather not choose realistic. Is it possible to play the campaign with custom difficulty settings?