First, I have to say that I didn't play beta 1 because I'm not a combat guy and I was eagerly waiting for the diplomacy beta, so maybe some of these things may have already been addressed by someone previously.
Major disappontment: the UP
Well, not really that much disapponting, but from livestreams and such I had the impression that the UP was going to be much more interactive and have larger diplomatic scope and impact than what is actually in. I thought it was going to be something like Civ5's UN, but actually it seems to be Just GalCiv2's UP with the addition of a couple minor features. AI doesn't seem to care at all about UP votes, I don't know how much of this depends on the fact that the AI is still far from complete: I helped electing an Altarian chairman, expecting at least a small relationship bonus, but they didn't care. Since the chairman chooses the resolutions to be voted, I expected that they were chosen strategically by the AI controlling the UP, but it doesn't seem to be like that. While the Altarians were controlling the UP, they voted against every single resolution they supposedly proposed. Like in GalCiv2, there is no way to discover what other civs would vote, nor to trade your vote for relationship bonuses, money or anything, nor to convince other Civs to approve your resolutions in exchange for whatever they need.
Also, I would actually like to be able to consult my allies on what would they like as a proposal when I'm chairman.
Miscellanea
- I miss a lot of informations in the zoomed out view: all those nice little icons showing wether a colony is building something, if it's garrisoned, if it's idle or simply there is no more space to build stuff... You can see those only if you are relatively close to the planets, while they would be actually more usefull when you are zoomed out and looking at all your empire at once, especially if you are playing a big map, when you'll spend less time in closeup view.
-Similarly, in GalCiv 2 (maybe only in the Endless Universe version, I don't remember byt it's not important) when zoomed out, wormhole icons had a different colour the the other anomalies. It would be nice if that came back in GC3. It would actually be nicer if artifacts, junk, ship graveyards, and all the different kinds of anomalies had different icon colours.
-I like how the game auto upgrades ships as soon as you unlock some new tier of components, however I miss the ability to build obsolete models if i want to. If I need to upgrade that space station just a few tiles away from the spaceport, I don't need that new fancy constructor model that is more expansive than the base one you start with and requires five times more turnes to be completed. Especially in newly established peripheric starports, where it takes ages to build the newer models.
-Just to try it, I set everything to abundant, and it turns out that planets and especially habitable ones are not abundant at all. At least not as much as it would be in a GC2 map with the same setting: my home planet was sorrounded by empty stars and uninhabitable planets.
Minor nitpicking
It feels weird how the relationship meter in the diplomacy screens is reversed: In GalCiv2 (and I'd say any other game ever) higher values are on the right side of any scale, and low values are on the left side. Here it's the opposite. I think I can get used to it, still it's strange.
Ship designer freeze:
I tried to build and early surveyor ship as soon as I unlocked the survey module.
I used as base the Terran Explorer and tried to add the module to the nodes I marked in the picture below and the module disappeared. Then I tried to rotate the view, and the ship became invisible too. I removed the module and the ship came back, so I decided to add a small decorative piece to any of those nodes so that I could use it as a support for my module, and everything went pear-shaped all of a sudden. First the game freezed, then everything else freezed and finally I had to hard reset the computer. Same happens on the two symmetric nodes on the opposite side of the ship.
