Well after you colonise a planet you do have to give some thought to build order, positioning of buildings and allocation of citizens. So you do have to work at building up a good colony and empire.

In general I agree with you about exploration and it maybe being a bit run-of-the-mill colonising a new planet but you have to be careful about overall pacing and not to get too bogged down in certain aspects and I think the pacing in Galciv is pretty good at the moment for a 4x.

Not sure what could be done to make colonising a new planet more interesting or consequential. But could be interesting to flesh it out a little bit more.

What you say is overexaggeration - Endless space 2 do not force you to wait FIFTY turns, plus, the actual time is dependent on conditions. But they have invented a good step back from "Conquer galaxy" button. The harder something is to achieve, the better.

What I am saying/suggesting more likely is to take example from Sid Meiers Civ - where you have to prepare tiles for the city (planet) to grow. With good/green planets there may not be necessary special preperations - the buildings could be built right as they are now. But there are dozens of planet types where it should be far harder. Some planets could be easy to make available for empire needs, some may be effortless (green planets) but some could be much harder.

Who knows, perhaps its not the tiles that should be transformed in the first place, but rather atmosphere. The exact method how to harden colonization is an idea, and, as I said, I will not come up with the ideas. Ideas are cheap.

Well i was thinking yesturday about what you said about endless space. Outpost idea. I would have to agree to disagree with you on this. The only good idea ive seen come from making you wait is like 1603. Where they went from colony to town. You could have something like this with from outpost to colony where you still build while you wait maybe different things for an outpost no upgrafe option.

Personally i like civs city screen where you position citizens on tiles to get bonuses. Bonuses get better when you improve them. Im not saying getting rid on the current citizen system i like that to, but maybe it could be more like civilization where if they are not working tiles they could specialize. Call to power had a nice idea where if you put citizens in buildings it would raise the bonus you are giving. The adjancency system would work with this well. Maybe one adjancency level per level of citizen. 

Extreme planets already do what you suggest you are talking about further diversifying extreme planets.

Also if you dont make suggestions then dont be surprised when your ideas are miscinstrued, because i have to disagree with the op on something compared to 2 the base, and crusades have deffinately made some strides in the exploitation department. My guess you didnt play 2. So yes making a long list of ideas would go a long to helping you.

Moot either way that means you could let multiple colonise planets. This could be decided by influence. If tjey like. When i said about endless space i was talking about the outpost. As far as planet types it is nice they dont have class zero planets. There are both sizes and types. In galactic civilizations they have sizes and two classifications on types. I guess they could add more. Why would you be able to colonise multiple kinds of extreme planets at once doesnt make sense to me, but tbat is the problem of tech we dont have. We dont know, so you might be right. What does make sense is that i should be able to drop an outpost. Not even endless space does that lets you learn multiple extreme planets at once, but one for each tech. The two games devide terran planets into different types, but asking for more types of extreme planets is doable.

I do like endless space build thingy. I like galactic civilizations shipyards. And the way they customise ships.

What is nice would if everyone instead of starting with terran planets, and being able to colonise terran planets. If different civilizations could start with different types of planets. Im not talking about torians being able to colonise aquatic and terran. It would be more like torians only being able to colonise aquatic. They would do it advanced like with regular chance of resources. That doesnt mean that terrans would be able to get resources of aquatic.

You got something called an imagination, my man?  I figure that 2 out of every 3 of my colonists never see their 5th year.  They get shredded by razor rain, or eaten by some sort of mouth-tree, or forget to blink every 6 hours when the mirror lens on the moon swings the sun's reflection like a laser across their cityscape (frying their irises & making it far more likely they'll succumb to the mouth trees). I'm not sure any of that is in stardock's animation budget, but guess what: it should be alright if it's not.  Let's everyone try and meet the game dev's halfway...

I agree with OP here there are a lot of small things that can be done to make colonization more interesting, bigger changes at this point are sadly better left for a new game I think.

In GalCiv a planet is either good or it isn't. Look at Master of Orion 2 for example, in that game you can colonize almost everything right at the start of the game. The problem is that some planets have more potential then others and some are more easily colonized. There is also a difference in the map here that yellow stars more often have planets with life and the hotter blue stars have better access to minerals. The exploration of GalCiv could have this too. The Stellar Cartography tech from GalCiv II was a huge help to determine where to scout next. What if another tech could show what colour stars have so you have an idea of what you might find. This could guide you in the exploration fase. Perhaps strategic resources and habitable worlds could be a bit more clustered in map generation with blue star systems having a higher change of resources. This could help because stars are further appart now an I get the feeling resources are too, this leads to a decrease in miningstarbase effeciency.

During the phase were you start to colonize more and more worlds there could be a bunch of technologies that open more possibilities for colonization during the game (give a lot of existing techs across all trees a terraform purpose). For example Master of Orion had planetary shields those helped with defending planets but also helped in the first step of terraforming radiated worlds. Or the toxic processor that reduced pollution but also helped terraform toxic worlds in MOO (2016). If the planet itself is highly radioactive perhaps armour technology would improve the possibility of construction buildings there. Conversely specific conditions on planets could give certain bonusses like in Endless Space 1 and 2, cold planets improve science and hot planets improve industry. The reasoning is that cold planets give free coolant to computing processes and hot planets give free heat for certain industrial processes. 

I also like the way Endless Space 2 handles colonization because not all is lost when a colony ship arrives a turn too slow. If you make the effort by either sending more money or food or troops you can still get the planet. You can even blockade the planet and starve the outpost of the other empire without even the need to decleare war for it, because it happens on neutral ground and without having any formal relations with the other empire at the start of the game.

GalCiv has a lot of things that make it amazing but in my opinion GalCiv III didn't fully utilize the strenghts of GalCiv II.

• You can design you own space ships which is absolutely amazing, so use that. Make the cinematics in such a way that they show your designs, the diplomacy screen could possibly also show some ships in the background too.
• You can make your own faction so use those civilization abilities, create some interesting mechanics arround some of them so different races can feel and especially play different. The Drengin could be all about abducting population for their slave pits before invading planets is technologically possible.
• Embrace the 2D map, it's never going to be realistic so have intersting mechanics interact with it. Different sizes for all the celestial bodies, maybe the occasional supernova, perhaps the expansion of a blackhole that needs to be stopped, etc.
• The United Planets, Civ has something similar but it's not the same. Maybe it would be fun if you could buy other people's votes by doing specific things for them, or pressure them with an embargo to vote for what you want. Ever shifting alliances could really make the diplomatic game a lot more interesting.
• Finally the ideologies is also somehting that is quite unique in GalCiv. Instead of them being based mostly on events they could also partly be based on player choices. What if breaking deals would lead to getting malevolent points or resigning from the united planets. What if forming alliances and helping others like give a planet to minor race because their star is about to go supernova would give you benevolent points. I'm not really sure how to factor pragmatic in this but I'm sure something can be designed for this.

The 4x genre has remained quite stagnant over the years but there have been some developments in recent years with Endless Legend and Endless Space, even Stellaris. I like the political system of Endless Space 2 that changes based on your choices and the changing map of Civ 6 Gathering Storm (Alpha Centauri *cough*). I think one of the reasons GalCiv III didn't live up to it's legendary predecessor is because it didn't do anything really new. If GalCiv expands on it's strenghts and if there are some minor changes to III, I think III would be a great game and 4 is going to be amazing.

I play on medium maps because my computer is somewhat old and I don't want to upgrade just for GalCiv III. But I have the feeling that the game is not really balanced for different sizes anyway. You have that one mercenary ships which will help you scout half the map by before turn 20 on smaller maps. I feel that the pace of the game would be better if you could potentially colonize everything, but the return you get in more difficult biomes increases over time with better tech. Like giving different techs and buildings a double purpose instead of putting all terraform tech in one or two branches.

Take the new Master of Orion for example, you still have a early colony rush but you will be colonizing the entire game. You can colonize increasingly more hostile enviroments because you have better tech or because you already have a base nearby that helps. And in time you can terraform most worlds to look like your homeworld. The increased number of tiles is a good system but I can't remember if there was also a visual cue in the form of showing more cities if you zoom in or the planet becoming more blue or green. On the other hand making a small change like variable sizes of stars and black holes (maybe add some other star types like pulsars) could make the map a lot more fun and immersive. A certain planet is far more memorable if you know it's that special Ice world where you had your labs in that system with the giant blue star.