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Are you sure you aren't getting GalCiv 2 mixed with Sins of a Solar Empire? Galactic Civilizations series has a huge campaign. Can understand the other two issues though.

I think I get what you mean about ship building getting being tedious. The first time you make a ship it's fun. When you have to redesign a ship to deal with a new threat or a new problem, that is also fun. When you have to go through and replace all your type 3 lasers with type 4 lasers only to replace them all again 5 terns latter without them ever evening have been used. That is the tedium.

You could fix that maybe with an auto upgrade feature that keeps your ships up to date with the latest versions of each component. You could also take out a lot +1 components. Like just have lasers and deathrays, but no lasers 2 or deathray 2. You whould still keep the techs like lasers 2, only they would upgrade the base component rather then giving you a new one.

You're missing something.  Ship designing is one of the 'one of a kind' features that made galciv2 a classic.

The best thing about building your own ships in galciv2 was that it saved your designs for later use in other games.

GC2 since Dread Lords had default ship designs that unlocked once you researched the techs required. The ship designing aspect was one of my favorite things to do in GC2. Though as of TotA you can chose to let the AI "auto upgrade" your designs for you.

I would hope that SD keeps this mechanic in GC3 (plus the option to auto upgrade). I couldn't say much on ways to improve upon it, because i cant really think of anything.

Since i am all psyched about GC3 i am gonna play me some GC2

Ideas:
-Maybe being able to set some designs to only last the current game, while setting others to be kept around for future games.
-Maybe set some designs to be part of a generation of ships. When you get the technologies for the next step up, it will automatically obsolete the old design and use the new design. You could configure this during ship designing or some time later.
-Maybe you could import ships instead of automatically getting everything. You can pick and choose what is currently useful (and even un-obsoleting obsolete ships).

I like the shipbuilding part of the game.  Automatically upgrading as new weapons become available can get expensive and economy plays a significant part in GalCiv.  I can leave older weapons on ships as long as they're still useful.  

The ships also don't need to stop and upgrade for x turns, depending on their location.  This is particularly important when a mixed fleet has to be in a particular area at a specific time or if you're playing cat and mouse with a superior fleet.

That being said, it would be fine as an option.

I find upgrading ships costs money and time is realistic. It takes time and money to put new systems into a vessel and that systems won't come out of nowhere, they have to be produced. And while in shipyard, a battle ship is nothing more than so much tons of dead metal, an easy target for every one.

For myself, I re-designed my ships quite often. Either to redegisgn it to match a new thread or simply because a newer tech grade gives more room on your ship and I wanted them as effective as possible, So after a new tech level (sometimes, not every time) you gain some free space that you can put something userful into (additional shield generator, armor, some other gimmick).

I couldn't refit all ships of course (that's too expensive), but I always wanted new ships be as optimized as can be.

To prevent your ship from being easily killed while refitting, I'd propose a shipyard orbiting a planet (and its defenses). This under refit won't help defending the planet, but an attacker had to crack the planets defenses to take out your ship as well.

This isn't really the same thing I am asking for.