We need more evil stuff to do. Preferably with great graphic effects. Where are my terror stars etc.? I need something to punish my enemies greatly when they deserve it!

Another thing, I may be overlooking the cost factor, but if you want more flavor and immersion, I have three words, voice-overs, voice-overs, and voice-overs.

And, indeed, more good and neutral stuff to do too.

An ideology revamp to make the whole system less horribly dependent on colonization events would be nice; something which actually made my actions in the game matter. Killing colony ships should give evil points, as should blowing up planets; setting up trade routes should give neutral points (unless they're slave routes). Diplomatic treaties should give points of the type the other party is most invested in; declaring war on evil civs should give Good points and visa versa. Hell, every action in the game could be divided into 'good', 'neutral' and 'evil' actions, and give a point of ideology (though the cost of traits would need increasing a fair bit).

My empire's ideology should be shaped by the way I play the game and not by the me deciding which set of bonuses I fancy this game. Colonization events should be a rare bonus, not something that I might have to click through 3 or 4 times in a single turn. 

Yes, absolutely!

Invasion – Invasions should be  expensive long drawn out affairs.  I would like to see a system where you don’t take a planet in 1 turn.   I envision having to build an army(tanks, soldiers, etc).   Each planet would have it’s own defenders spread over the planet.  Each turn the attacker you pick a tile that it did not control and fight over it(ground combat viewer).  If they win then the next turn the remaining forces move on to another tile.  Once they control all the tiles then they control the planet.  This would give planetary defenses extra meaning.  Also it would allow the defender to rush reinforcements to the planet in attempt to keep it,(if they can fight thru the blockade)   Each time you fight in a tile you have a chance to damage/destroy the building.

Planet-buster techs.

I want to be able to mod the games economy to the macro level. Right now things are micro, and they just add up to empire wide totals, I would add regional effects and whatever else I could code to the games government techs.

I am not smart enough to add diplomacy functions so I hope you guys continue to make it more awesome.

I would look forward to fleet comanders and other combat enhancements, always a good source of fun for me.

What else...galciv had a lot already, seeing changes to existing elements and enhanments seems like the best thing I could wish for right now.

DARCA

- Invasion Feature

- Terror Stars

- Legendary Deeds (see Endless Legend's Guardian expansion)...  I think these add important subgoals to the game.

- Stealth ships, combat with sensors

- Planetary minor improvements (sensor range, defense improvements, etc.) that don't affect the limited planet hexes.

- A diplomacy game system.  Warscore, cassus belli, fear/respect.  Whatever.  Something more than just trading and positive/negative number indicating relationship.

I second the removal of the production wheel also.  I hate that stupid thing.

I will keep this short and sweet. 

1. With extensive tech research; The ability to Destroy and Create planets as well as make uninhabitable ones habitable. 

Wishlist for the expansion? Oh dear, where to start:

- military objectives in space like rogue comets and asteroids that can be fortified to act as a regional supply depots of significant strategic value. These would boost fleets in a large radius around them and would serve as important military outposts that are capturable

- ability to capture starbases

- ability via tech to even further boost the range of starbases OR give starbases a 2 hex initial larger radius so we can build less starbases and thus give them more value. This would work even better then with previous mentioned idea (starbase capture)

- ability to recruit officers with various abilities that can then be assigned to fleets. Nothing as intricate and complex as heroes in Fallen Enchantress series, but something to give your fleets bonuses. These officers would be rare and/or expensive and thus would be used to boost only a handful of your fleets to a more elite/prestigious status

- ability to disable adjacency gamewide for both the player and the AI. Unless you can make the AI as good as the player at properly positioning buildings it would be better to have a choice to turn this feature all the way off so we can just place buildings anywhere

- a 4th weapon class such as wave based weapons

- random variances in the research tree to spice things up. Small techs that are hard to research and would provide some permanent bonus. These would appear randomly for both the player and the AIs, however if anyone gets such a tech AND completes the research, that tech automatically becomes available for research to all the rest, giving whomever got it first only a temporary bonus

- more music, soundtrack is nice but quite sparse

- doomsday weapons. Hard to build, slow to move, but kick serious butt

- more potent minor races. Dont make them so easy to conquer! Also give them a visible sphere of influence so they are easier to see on the map

Better Death Stars! Blowing up planets makes the game so dramatic and intense! I feel so evil when I commit genocide against a race I've pushed to the brink. 

True indeed. Planetary invasion should require land, sea, and air superiority and should take weeks to complete even without resistance. With resistance it should be even harder to invade and indeed possible that an invasion grinds to a halt leading to permanent stalemate.

Continuing on this idea, it should be possible for an empire to receive concessions from another empire on a planet much like the Qing Dynasty gave concessions in Tianjin to the various European powers. Conceding tiles to foreign powers on a planet should grant them the benefits of whatever production is created on that particular tile.

Please for the love of God do something to make fighting pirates beneficial. Right now they just act as obstacles and penalties for not moving your defenseless ships one tile at a time. Watch a Mascen Let's Play, you'll see him doing this a lot. I just turn them off because they are pointless and annoying. Make me WANT to turn them on, perhaps with veterancy.

I've been thinking about how the espionage system could be for GC3. In GC2 you could train spies and then order them to spy on a civilization gathering data or have them shut down an improvement on a planet. For GC3 I was thinking the system should offer the player more choices on what to do with spies.

For example, you could have a spy infiltrate an opponent's colony, if they succeeded you had access to a screen similar to your own colonies screen, except instead of building improvements, you gave the spy orders on what projects to carry out, build spy network, siphon research or credits for your own use, reveal what improvements are built, reveal improvements queued, etc. I'd like to imagine the spies as operatives, that after their network is build up they could have thousands of agents, collaborators, bribed officials working for them. It always seemed silly to me in GC2 that one person could stop an improvement by themselves, I imagined them as city sized buildings. Chances of success should be affected by different variables, spy's level, skills, planet's approval, if it is in your area of influence, etc.

Of course gathering data on a civilization at the empire level should still be in, like how it was in GC2. I was thinking that you could also see it's rally points if you had infiltrated it enough. 

Starbases should also be vulnerable to spies. And if the conditions are right they can even make one switch over to your side.

Obviously, there should be some form of defense against spies. Having your own spies perform counter-intelligence operations, special improvements that affect enemy spies success chances, etc.

Strong culture should arguably act as a defense to spy like things. It represents the average citizen's susceptibility to bribery/etc. Would also act as a natural counter to industry focused empires that neglect culture, they are driving themselves hard and their citizens are quite liable to extortion/bribery/foreign ideas.

Starbases

I think improvements could be done to that aspect of the game. 

• Imho, not all starbases should provide range extension, only military starbases.  That would increase the usefulness of military starbases.  Also, by their nature, I think military starbases should have a bigger influence area for their fleet helping capacities.

• Starbases should be movable, like shipyards, one move per turn.  Right now, we build a starbase, try to calculate where its area of influence will fall later in the game so that we can grab all the resources we can with one base.  And then we realize we made a mistake, we're just one sector too far to grab a specific resource.  Destroy the base, rebuild a new one a sector aside.  Why not have the base move itself one sector to the east instead?   Deep Space Nine was moved from the orbit of Bajor to the Wormhole after all!

• If moving a starbase is not an option, maybe we could see the actual area of influence for our starbase in one color, and another line for where its maximum range would be, once we have all the required techs?

• Requesting constructors is a bit of a chore.  Right now, in late game, when I have a large empire with many shipyards, I need to go to every one of them, re-activate them if they were shutdown, request constructors from all my starbases, go back to unused shipyard, shut them down or make them produce something else.  Now, what if "request constructor" would automatically re-awaken the nearest shipyard and have it construct the ship it needs?

Diplomacy and trade

As it is now, you build a trade ship, you send it to some distant planet and you have a trade route.

Maybe we could first need to enter a trade agreement with the nation, then we can send our merchants.  And maybe, in times of war, or even pirates, could squat a trade route and diminish our trade income, forcing us to divert resources to deal with this threat, as it would be done in a real war.  Maybe have a tech/ideology that arms our trade ships?  Just pushing unefined ideas...

Default trade ship upgrades:  All default ships upgrade themselves with the newer engines as soon as they are discovered.  The newest constructor model always has the newest engines.  However, the default trade ships will always stay at 4 parsecs/turn.  It's be nice if I did not have to design a bunch of trade ships with the right engines along the way

Invasion: Some kind of action there!  Text only is boring

Events: Some kind of action there!  Text only is boring

Defection/Rebellion: if your morale is too low on a planet, it could increase the probability every turn of that planet declaring independance from your empire.

Fleet battle: Babylon 5, Space Above & Beyond, BattleStar Galactica... these are the kind of visual improvements I'd like to see.  Big ships should stay behind and pound at the ennemy fleet.  A carrier would be even further behind and launch its ships into battle, then move forward and engage the ennemy with their guns.  A missile platform built to stay behind and launch from afar, a cruiser going right down the ennemy's throat to strike the killing blow.  An option to retreat from the battle, trying to preserve a part of your fleet would be nice.  You could see a badly dammaged ship sacrifice itself to preserve the fleet, going down in flames.  Right now, huge or tiny, all ships act the same.  It looks like a uncivilized brawl.  We got space artillery, use it dammit!

Survey ship automation: As a human player, I will either arm my survey ships or have them escorted by two corvettes to be able to survey ship graveyards with hostile and survive encounters with stray pirates still left in the game.  However, the way it is now, when you ask your ship to survey on its own, it will totally ignore these relics.  And the AI will never bother with them either.  First, the AI needs to adapt, learn to escort these ships, and two, the automated survey should not ignore these graveyards, but rather simply prompt you about it, like when you manually move your ship and if you refuse to enter the anomaly, keep on exploring the nearest relics.  Also, if at some point in the game your scout or your survey ship as finished exploring everything in their range, you should get a pop up telling you so, so you can manually move your ship elsewhere, some place safe until they can go further.

Spying:

I could envision a system similar to the Total War series where spies are agents you train and developped over the course of their missions.  The more successful missions they do, the more experience they have and less costly/faster are their missions.  They could be inserted in a planet and developp a spy network that would help you over time: send you research info that gives you research point, embezzle money, or sabotage military building just before an invasion takes place.

Duranthium:

Way too much of it, not nearly enough use.  In a big map, I could easily get 4-500 net duranthium production and I can't do anything with it, except build a duranthium refinery, which I can't built everywhere since 1.3, since the huge terraforming tech was removed.  Same could be said for other resources, albeit not as bad.  Except for prometheon, they don't seem that useful in mid to late-game.

It just occurred to me that invasion should offer an option to siege the planet with warships vs an invasion. The planet could then fight the siege by sally forth or outside help. The planet would fall after X turns depending on PQ and food factors.

Would be nice to be able to customize fighters for your carriers.