Hi!

I bought the Beta recently after having played GalCivII for... a significant amount of time to say the least, and I'm really loving it.

Some things that have caught my attention thus far:

The concept of Ideoligies is fantastic, it really makes each playthrough different than the last.

Starports are really cool and much better than building ships from planets.

I love the standard ship designs for Terrans. Ship designs in GalCivII sucked, they were very cartoonish and simplistic, and I ended up creating entirely new designs for every major civ; but the new ones are very stylish and "realistic". It's a shame the Drath aren't in the game right now, they had cool ship templates.

The custom civ creator needs a little work. We should really be able to edit existing civs (including the standard ones), because copying them, deleting the original and recreating the civ just to correct one typo is a chore. There also seems to be a problem when assigning a home star system to a custom civ: the game renames the entire system after the home planet. There are also only about 8 or 9 star systems to choose from when creating a custom civ, and by the looks of them, these are the home systems of existing civs.

On naming: something that I loved about GalCiv II was that we could name a whole bunch of things, from our ships and planets down to even the mining modules attached to asteroids. We can't really do that much anymore. It would be great if we could in-game rename stars, unhabitable planets, and everything else we can click on. Things like that really make our playthroughs unique and help with immersion, since alot of the star names are pretty stupid (sorry, Founders); it's bad enough having a star called Murderboat, but also planets Murderboat I through V.