Sadly, it's very difficult for a new player to install mods from zip. I used Discord screen share to help new players install and it takes on average 15 minutes to get autociv installed. Unfortunately I have dealt with several highly ranked players who were unable to extract a zip file, including 2 people who outright claimed that all 0ad mods are malwares. Mod.io is not intuitive neither (for newbies) and I have submitted numerous mods to mod.io before but none got through. They were very simple balance patches or adding a civ. 

We can do 2 types of updates: micro updates where only public is changed, then large updates where the engine is changed. For the micro updates, we can do an auto-updater: click a button and pull from the git repo. 

At what point does the game crash? While connecting? Please attach the log files mentioned in the error message.

Maybe? Just looking for a convenient place where it will be seen/addressed.

Great. I always find these stats interesting. It would be amazing if we can consistently retain these users. 

Just fyi we are now higher than we were for A23b with A26 and now a27

Doing this could help. It seems the game is trying to serialize some wrong values. You might also try to delete matchsettings.json and other cache files.