Thank you for the opportunity to weigh in. My requests are all management related.

1. Overhaul of zoomed out graphics. I find I really need to stare to sort out what I am looking at. Visually very difficult to find what I'm looking for as compared to Galciv II. My ship icons within other influence zones are almost invisible. Ship icons don't seem to match ship types - should have the icons scaled to hull size. Starbase types are also hard to rapidly differentiate.

2. Overhaul rally points. Yes I can get ships there but find the ships and fleets difficult to manage within with rally point. Selecting individual fleets and moving them is not intuitive. This was better implemented in Galciv II. I would also like to be able to specify only new ships of a certain type to be sent to a rally point. Accidentally sending your various carefully placed ships to a rally point is frustrating. I also miss the auto-fleet function. They are visually hard to spot compared to GalcivII (see 1. above).

3. Better filtering and selection. Would like to be able to flip through the colony management screens based on filter selections (population, production, wealth, research etc.). Currently filtered colony lists reset after visiting a colony management screen. Would also like to select and manage colonies based on location using click-drag-select, same with ships for movement commands. Hopping all over the empire makes me feel ADD and I lose track of tactics within a specific area.

4. Way too many core ship model options, and user versions created at differing tech levels during previous games. Selecting multiple ship options at a time and deleting/obsoleting them would make this much more manageable than the current tedious one-at-a-time method of cleaning up the available ship options.

5. Yes, constructor spam is bad.

A few ideas I have had kicking around for a while

Something I have found while playing multiplayer is that whenever my friend is being attacked/involved in an early war I have the ships he needs so i have two options send the fleets to the end of their range and then give the vessels to my ally or i build starbases to extend my own range to help in the war myself.

While playing i regularly say it would be cool if there was a way of creating an alliance/ treaty agreement to share starbases range for the duration (25/50 turns?) e.g. in the games sense i can refuel at my allies starbases and use them as staging areas (would be nice imho)

I have found that unless there is a Drengin AI or a particularly aggressive custom faction that i have made in a game there is no emphasis on early war in my experience at least. it would be nice if there was a form of the invasions from Gal civ 2 (yes i could have pirates on but I generally play with other players in MP ) 

A feature which I believe would be really useful is the ability to survey planets before you colonise them (using a surveyor) this would allow you to see how the tiles on the world will be laid out and could definitely help with your overall empire management/ plan.

The ability to queue research would be nice. (while yes some research require direct input into how you want to specialize them it would still be a nice feature)

And as many people have mentioned before it would be nice if the constructor spam which ultimately plagues your shipyards for turns on end could be resolved, so some workaround would be nice like creating a mega constructor that is the equivalent to 3 constructors modules.

An idea that I found pretty cool would be to have excess manufacturing on a world carry over to the next building/improvement in the queue to reduce the amount of industry being wasted every turn.

While not a new feature more like a bug fix/ pet peev have the governing slider not reset itself on every planet when I reload the game.

It would be cool if you could build a cheap sensor station to give you view range on the edge of your territory (i know you could just use a starbase but it would add some variety imo)

Or add the ability to create patrol routes which your ships follow and if they encounter an enemy ship/ fleet a notification asks you if you want to first view it then attack or retreat.

In multiplayer I find that late game it takes some time for the people i am playing with the end their turns and so i sort of get distracted by my planet screens a much louder / adjustable its your turn noise would be much appreciated

More diplomatic actions would be nice like forming coalitions / creating an alliance objective ( for example set a specific planet as the liberation goal and join a coalition to liberate one of the smaller AI factions.

More United planets stuff! at the moment you get the same few options every session it would be nice if there was some massive penalty to leaving the Up like a trade ban or negative diplomacy ( I am not really experienced with what happens when you leave as i love the UP idea and have never left  its just aggressive AI just leave and they really don't seem to suffer from it)

I feel there is a need to clarify the government types in research when you do specializations and it changes the government (federalist party etc), is this overriding previous specializations or is this stacking? there's no tool-tip on the planet showing them from what I see ingame.

Thanks for reading!  

Main requests now that I've played a bit:

1) Some sort of diminishing returns to specializing planets and ships. Right now, it seems like specializing your planets is WAY stronger than not. Research planet? 100% research. Building things? 100% manufacturing. With no disadvantage to cranking everything to 100%, it seems like that's the default choice. Even when building on a research planet, might as well go 100% manufacturing until done building and then go back to 100% research. A system that rewarded balance would be a lot more interesting imo. This is also true for ships. My transports are way better if I just throw 10 engines on them, why would I bother with things like sensors and such? Battles are absurdly easy even before carriers because human designed ships will pack WAY more punch or just generally be superbly awesome compared to the default "little bit of everything" designs. The 2nd engine should not add as much speed as the first one did, and the 5th engine should definitely be less effective.

2) I wish the summary screen for planets on the right would make Manuf and Science output for planets visible as well. Why show us money if that doesn't matter?

3) I also wish I could sort them in some manner.

4) I kind of wish patriotic was nerfed tbh, it feels somewhat mandatory when building a custom race.

5) I wish the scoring and multiverse interface were better. I have no clue why I scored what I did. It is very hard for me to see how I'm doing with highscores, find myself in the hall of fame, etc.

1. Economy Improvement- Adjustable tax rate, economy that can actually go in negatives

2. Happiness- Make it actually matter, remove large empire penalty

3. Ability to end turn with idle units

4. Better AI, especially more in war and diplomacy and planet management

5. Get rid of the neutral policy that blocks war being declared

6. United planets founded at first contact like in gc2 as opposed to hundreds of turns in

I also might add that in the game of say 100-120 players you quickly run out of schemes to paint your races. There are 40 schemes which would cover only 1/3 races in the game. So in any given BIG game you will have at least three races that are colored the same scheme.

The situation is even worse when choosing minimap colors. There are currenly 15 colors. So in the big game you will have at least 7 races that share the same minimap color. You will not be able to tell them from one another without zooming in for closer look.

Ok I am going to copy n paste my thread into this one...

I cant seem to find a 'feature request' thread so Ill put up a few I want and forum folks can remove/add or whatever.

• I want to decommission entire lines of ships in my inventory. If I have 5 of the  Saber mk III and 3 of the Mk II and 4 of the Mk I, I want to be able to have a way to decommission or retire them. I am ok with doing each version but lets put that ability in one place instead of having to click one every ship. Now, I know you can decommission an entire fleet, I love this however sometimes I want to retire only one type in a fleet and keep the others. 
• I want the ability to sell/trade an entire fleet that I own to another civ. This can perhaps be game breaking but the idea is to build some fleets that are good but not my super designs, fleet em up and park them and 'sell' em. Too bad we don't have a 'highest bidder' option but that may come years from now. Brokering war, good times!
• I want to use Pirates as the tools that they are. Can we get a DLC that enhances them as a minor but they get specific traits and perks, and are 'galaxy' wide in how they operate? The cannot invade or own planets but can own star bases and can be used as hired mercenaries or general trouble makers. As I stated previously the potential for Pirates is amazing and I am hopeful Stardock will leverage them as a full DLC or perhaps an expansion. The number of Pirate portraits I am hoping to see is unlimited! Arrrrgh......
  
• I want to threaten another to stop war, trade, or whatever or I will DOW on them. This may or may not hold sway. In fact I would love snarky (margarita-driven) responses that I can say to the AI if just to annoy them for NO other reason. If I can push them to 'hate' me or point out that I am helping them that would be a nice touch to move the needle in either direction of how the Ai likes/dislikes you.
• Can I get a turn timer countdown on when i can talk to the Ai next? 
• After much game-play I have finally sided with the folks here about LEP. Can we re asses it and see if we can get a better system that encourages Tall and also does not kill Wide? Nasselus has a mod that takes us back to GCII and uses spiraling economy maintenance to inhibit early expansion till you get your first wave built and established.  I think the current system kills any game where the player has greater than 60 planets and makes the conquest victory painful and not even desired. 
• Can we get ideology events more often and can we get them also with invasions. Once the galaxy has been mostly colonized the ideology points pretty much end unless you get a specific trait here or there or put up the buildings. 
• Can we get 'Regional Capitals' similar to how Distant Worlds has? Put this up in the Government tech line and make it a Civ specific building. I suggest a total of 3 like DW and having one gives Morale or Economy bonuses to the other planets within x hexes away.... Again this will encourage TALL and also WIDE types of game-play and make this feature or tech line something to shoot for. 
• Can we get more techs in the Age of Ascension and increase their costs so we can have a way to use those 12,500 research points per turn we are churning out? Early game seems about right but late game is moving WAY to fast.
• Please bring back the Precursor event that gifts a random Ai player with spiraling abilities but have the event land at the end of the age of WAR so this ai can be a serious threat in the next age. 

Shared Victory for Multiplayer

Currently, the game only allows for competitive MP games, with all players pursuing victory on their own, and one winner at the end. Please also allow coop gameplay, where a team of players plays against the AI, pursuing a path to victory together and winning as a team.

Basic Multiplayer Settings

The game lacks basic settings for multiplayer, such as player name, session name, password protection for private session and turn time-limit for public sessions.

Even if you're allied with other human players or on the same team?

1. I miss the ability to upgrade improvements. Right now you need to destroy improvements, and then build over top. Ie. You build four factories then when you research power matrix, or get duranthium you need to go in and destroy a factory to replace it. This I lose production from factory.

2. Would like to combine research with other players.

3. Get rid large empire penalty for bigger maps.

4. Being able to rotate ships in ship builder.

5. Would like to see an option for my scout to auto explore stars only. Stats on the mini map.

1. Popup window for galactic achievements like Shrine of Tandis. How bad is this: You achieve a galactic wonder (yeah) and there is NO feedback. It's like building your 20th factory. There must be a nice pic, a short description and a congratulation.

2. Costs displayed at the "upgrade all ships"-screen. It's nearly useless now. Who's idea was it not having costs displayed?

3. I can sort ships at the shipyard by costs, size a.s.o., but in the right handed ship list I have every ship by itself. If the ship is moving by waypoint to a planet, the text where it's going is too much and is overlapping and unreadable. I must be able to sort by fleets at least. maybe by size, action, a.s.o.

4. Invasions are boring as hell.

In my memory, every single point was better implemented in GalCiv2.

These are really basic must haves that drove me crazy when playing the game. These things make the game look unfinished.

Yes, better AI and such things would be fine, but I think when someone plays the game casually, these four listed things are things which make the whole game look really bad in an instance.

Another wish:

5. Protection promise to minor races. If you play the "good guy" it's really annoying to see your befriended major race invade your befriended minor race and there is nothing you cvan do about it. So the major race invades your friends, colonizes the planet and some turns later the planet culture flips and is yours. So why have I not conquered them by myself? There is no game mechanic which gives me control or rewards me.

my wishlist:

1) actual, thorough documentation on moddable .XML files and components of the game and/or basic UI tools to work with them- this is absolutely critical to long-term survival of the game, since the way GC3 has spaghetti'd its XML definition files compared to GC2 and GC1 has made it extremely difficult to find and modify large portions of the game without repeatedly breaking it without error messages (IE loading hangs, CTD with no error message/log, and other Bad Stuff TM)

also, as previously stated, the GC3 engine needs to be able to support line-item editing in order to make mods more space- and maintenance-friendly. something like .LUA hook functionality or even the way GC2 implemented mods would be very welcome, if only so I don't have to scroll through hundreds of lines of entries to change six numeric values.

2) improved color pallet options: the is the 21st century, implementing Color Pickers is not hard. as it stands the customization options for custom races are fairly thin on the ground (I'm working on rectifying that, but it's slow going due to the issues mentioned above) and the color options are implemented hilariously badly.

3)better empire management tools: at the moment, lategame empire management is hell. the current tools are completely useless above 100-120ish planets, and that makes lategame empires on larger maps often more trouble than is worth it. I personally have not been able to actually finish a game on maps in Huge or larger, simply because the tedium of keeping your empire's economy from imploding and managing all your fleets and shipyards turns GC3 from a fun game into a mind-numbingly repetitive chore. quite frankly, having owned several other Stardock games, failing to balance for long games seems to be a chronic issue for them- any game that takes more than an hour or two in any of their products becomes a poorly balanced slog pretty rapidly.

4)better support of player ship themes and schema: mainly, the lack of ability to select specific ships to appear from Graveyards or Fighter Bays, coupled with the difficulty of implementing custom ship themes is a serious issue for player immersion, much like the aforementioned color pallet issues. honestly, given the degree of focus on the Custom Race options that was afforded to GC2, I'm somewhat baffled as to why GC3 has in many ways worse implementation for that particular aspect of its gameplay. the dearth of trait customization options alone is odd in light of the work of General Pants, which is on the 'must have' mod list of everyone I know who plays GC2.

5)Ideology:

Ideology, Ideology, Ideology.

*sigh*

the fact of the matter is, in its current state Ideology is not very integrated to the game and feels 'tacked on' rather than a core gameplay aspect. this is mainly due to it's lack of long-term gathering options- the various buildings are poorly balanced into uselessness, there are no unique systems to be had as in TOTA, and the fact that the only real way to gain it in the quantities needed lategame is fresh colonization, which is almost never an option by that point, makes it difficult to get any of the rank-four bonuses- especially if you've picked up a rank or two in the the other aspects due to specific choices. additional implementation of things that gain Ideology points is a must.

This is very hard.  FIVE THINGS, I love it so much (after my first weekend) that I don't know where to start:

1) SHIP REPAIRS.  Repair time for ships damaged after a battle, is unknowable.  So, I suggest breaking it into IN-SPACE repairs, SpaceDock repairs, planet-side repairs, and maybe paying friendly races MONEY to repair.  So, I talked about my thoughts on this post.  Maybe even a SpaceDock that has SHIP REPAIR MODULES that very quickly repair the damage to your ships.

         https://forums.stardock.com/470944/page/1/

2) NEGOTIATING BUTTONS.  Maybe some additional buttons to reset back to ORIGINAL OFFER or maybe allow us to store our BEST OFFER, then we keep working and wiggling on them to see if we can get a better deal before we select it.  I talked about it here:

        https://forums.stardock.com/470945/page/1/

3) FASTER CAMERA NAVIGATION.  Maybe allow us to name space (like Waypoints) but jump to it with the camera.  Again, I am new but the camera was a little nuanced and kept jerked around as I wanted to do things.  MINOR ISSUE.  It is time-consuming to keep scrolling the camera places.  I am not lazy but looks like maybe some named click locations could be used to jump to places in space that you are dealing with alot.

4) EDUCATING TECH TREE.  I love all of the TECH TREE but it didn't really seem to help me as I got further along.  I had planets set up just to research, and I kept getting lost in knowing how things are helping me.  I kept getting NEAT TECH but then I did not see new options when I went to the planets.  And, I just kept feeling I was clicking, clicking, clicking in the TECH WINDOW but that I was not really seeing how it was useful to my settlements.  Maybe, get a pop-up or video (like in FALLOUT 3 and VATS popups, or skill achievement unlocks in BIOSHOCK) that helps you know how a certain thing will benefit you.  Like a Tutorial option if you choose in the Tech Window.

5) MORE TUTORIALS / EDUCATIONAL OPTIONS.  I still don't fully understand Trade Routes (or how to get them going), why Spacedocks won't produce ships other than transports (and why my world's productions doesn't help me on my starbase), etc.  This would be solved by the Tech Tree and some educational videos or links as things appear to read.

6) BY TURN REVIEWER?  I wish that I could see how I was doing THIS TURN from LAST TURN or FIVE TURNS ago.  VISUAL SNAPSHOT / NUMERICAL POP-UP TOOL on a turn-by-turn (or some setting like 5 turns) where I can see progress.  I wish that I could see an overview of money, population, production, etc.  It is in all of the minor screens, but I don't get a sense of accomplishment (as much) from turn-to-turn because I would like to be able to look back over my reign and see how well I have progressed.  Otherwise, it is just a slosh from turn-to-turn without any real sense of universal progress being made.  The Ideology is nice, but I wish that I got more feedback or rewards as things go along, especially per planet.  Or, that is an idea to explore.

I bought the game on Steam, so maybe I didn't get a Manual to read or something.  So, I just figured it out myself by Youtube, but not everything is there.  I am still learning and have an outside prospective, because I have not played something like this (since SimCity or way back when).