There's a few things I'd love to see implimented into GalCiv.
My first is make a difference between Tinies and Huge. I don't just mean space. It's pointless to build a fighter with 2/0/0 and 0/2/0 on it when you can build a Huge for 10/0/0 and 10/10/10, 10x the hp, and for only 5x the price after you've done some miniaturization. Bigger ships go faster, too. What I'd personally prefer to see is Engine Size and Cost go up near exponentially per size, and add a 'carrier' type module allowing smaller ships to operate further away from your support zone, so you could bring a carrier into an enemy's territory and then swarm out four or five fast, effective fighter flights. In the current system, bigger is just always better, there's no reason to go back to an earlier build, or build it up, unless your logistics has space for that one random frigate in the fleet, or you're trying to slap some defenders into orbit on some new planet in a hurry and on the cheap. The biggest deal here is that 5 fighter fleet you built will degrade, even it had equivalent hitpoints, just from losing ships where the cap ship you built doesn't. Waste of money to build anything small except constructors, and maybe freighters if you're constantly losing trade lines. The smaller ships also can't penetrate the larger shields, though I'm not sure I'm against this IF the smaller ships have other uses... like I dunno... bigger ships miss them more without anti-fighter modules... etc.
Another thing I'd like to see is actually a gripe, and that's the over-complexity of the approval system, at least without having a calculator and 3 different website charts handy. That's a bit much for a space fighter game. Fine, I can't build 12 farms and have the people happy, cool, no issue. If my morale improvement says 25%, give me 25%, or show me (screentip or otherwise) exactly WHAT it's really giving me and why. The little popup in the planet's nice and all but it actually just makes you realize how much research you're about to do.
Also, as previously mentioned, please adjust the military ratings system. An example: I played peacemaker in one of my games and hid in the corner with a massive bank of econ sat's surrounding my two planets both going science full bore (had a nice corner sector position, 16 blown out econ sats can get you to the level of rediculous real fast). I built off a few fighter-scouts at the beginning just to get the initial aggressive folks to calm down and fight each other instead of me and then forgot about them drifting in the middle of nowhere when their auto-searches were done. Eventually I created two Battleships, and had about 15% of the military rating of someone I ticked off. I rolled them like they were jokes, unfleeted, and with only those two. I'm personally not entirely sure HOW to fix the current system for a better one, but there has to be a better way.
Please, for the sake of all that's sane, fix the economy spending bars. I can't have a science planet and a manufacturing planet both going full bore simultaneously. Practically defeats the purpose of the capitals as a significant goal. It's more along the lines of "Oh, look, I researched it... 'eh, guess I'll put it somewhere."
The AI REALLY needs to get aggressive at Influence centers more. You can practically run over anyone with them and they'll usually just threaten a bit unless you're really behind on the military might.
Speaking of Starbases, a few items:
1) Allow us to completely turn off specific items in the autobuild. After building eyes in the sky I don't care about sensors anymore. Honest. 2) When you're following a starbase conquering policy being able to queue where a constructor should go when the current one's done would be nice. I've had 30+ constructors in space at the same time and re-routing via the governor can be a royal pain when you want 5 here, 5 there, 2 there, and 4 over here. 3) Econ Starbases and traderoutes: In the trade screen, show us the base value, and what they're currently getting from the influence in their current position. It's very hard to tell sometimes why your econ is bouncing around like a pingpong because you forgot that the Gamorkians knocked out Econ stations 18A, 18B, 18C, and 18D in the backhills of deadspace. 4) It'd be really nice to be able to fleet them up with a defensive ship or two. Currently I can only get the Terror Stars to do that. 5) The Terror star is reusable. REALLY? That monstrousity that only took 10 100bc constructors (and half your lifetime to reach the target if you didn't build it close to them) can be re-used? My gawds. Stop that. 6) Constructors with multiple Construction units on them so you DON'T have to have 30+ constructors in the air to keep them cheap yet quickly build out a station. They'll end up the same support price (mostly). 7) Influence starbases should be able to spread influence in deadspace further then their reach. Having an influence starbase in deadspace with no influence modules has the exact same effect as one fully built out. 8)Please use a different way of showing which starbases get which types of modules out of the tech tree, it's vague at best until you memorize them for which ones the clover, the box, etc. Use symbols (gun, dollar sign, a handshake, etc) instead.
Somewhere in the main screen let us see the *entire* tech tree, and have it have tooltips for who gets what.
The illegal colonization the AI does is enough to make me want to beat the computer with a lollipop. At LEAST send a scout there first before I see a colonization ship whizzing past me.
I'd also like to second the ideas of the Damage Degradation to ships. If you're venting atmo and have most of your pieces flying off, you shouldn't be at full strength. Also UNP votes: Currently you can't even guess what your neighbors are going to do even with maxed infiltration via espionage until you've seen them enough times to know what the good, evil, and neutral civs are usually going to do. I'd at least like to work with my allies towards the same goal. Can't argue about the warship icons either. Heck, give us a set of 20 and let us assign them to different models would be good enough.
I'd love to see more variety in the weapons then just 'rock/paper/scissors' and a few space and cost points. Make scatter guns scatter, shotgunning the entire enemy fleet. Make beam weapons almost perfect aim weapons, just make them huge to compensate (call it an 'energy cost for its own reactors to power the gun' or something), so that a 2 beam vs. a 1 shield will almost always do 1 damage. Missiles in the middle (missiles track), autocannons at the other end (space is big, they are slow).
Seperate model lists per race. I like to build my "Cheap Constructor", my "SpeedScout", and my "Freighter II"'s for the race I'm playing at the time. There is no foreseeable reason not to put in a folder tree per race letting me have different templates with the same names when most people buy a computer off the shelf with half a terrabyte of space. This has to be one of the most annoying "little things" about the game.
I'd like to see more 'support' style additions to ships. The current ones (add to defense, attack, and speed) are nice, but more variety would be cool. A support ship extending a fleet's range (Refueling tanker, whatever). An orbital bombardment ship that if fleeted with a transport adds to advantage or another option on the 'attack' choices. A buoy dropper so you can leave sensor posts in the deep for a price. A flying cruise ship that adds morale to whatever it orbits.
Think that's it.