Wow, I was fairly certain this game was dead from the way they were talking about it 6 months ago. Bad Steam reviews, lack of time/rsrcs to work on things, wanting to remove the tile grid entirely in GalCiv4, etc. This is unexpected and pleasantly surprising.

I'm not going to bother weighing in on anything else this early on b/c I don't see any point, but since Frogboy specifically mentioned Multiplayer in his post (again, I'm shocked, but in a good way!), I'll just repeat... *yet again*... My request for a very minor feature that would mean a ton to my Multiplayer group: Ability to let AI players be RANDOM RACES when starting a Multiplayer game. Single-player has always been able to do this. Every other even remotely similar game supports this in MP, from launch. It should take an hour to implement imo, yet nothing's been done in over 2 years despite repeated requests and a promising dev response... sigh.

I cannot reiterate this > 

• Making really big maps more enjoyable to play on.  It's one of our strongest features and they're annoying (IMO)

This is the ONLY 4x game with maps this size. Using a mod in Civ VI Yanmp comes close but nothing like Stardock. I know all of use have  preferred play styles but truly I feel there is nothing more entertaining than settling down to a Gal Civ game on an insane map and really spending 4 hours exploring. FOUR HOURS! Its a glorious time and for me enjoyable time sink. I think if more players could use it the might. I may even build another system with 64 gigs of ram just because I know Stardock may make a new 4x game!

Makes a mockery of the whole idea of Ideology, though.

I mean, the Soviet Union didn't flip-flop between Communism and Capitalism at a whim. Nor the United States. They stuck their respective choice.

And if it is Pragmatic to not stick to one Ideology, should that even be called an Ideology?

Ideology: a system of ideas and ideals, especially one which forms the basis of economic or political theory and policy.

Simply chance the name to Options/Choices and be done with it.

I thought it was Pragmatic to pick the best x for situation x and the best y for situation y.

I will very strongly second this. I love giant maps. My very favorite individual playthrough of GalCiv came back in the first Windows version when I had such a large map and so many things going on I had to keep paper logs of what went where, since I was fighting on three fronts at once. I even was using a paper system to put in ship requests! It sounds like work but it really was amazingly immersive.

Actually yes.  We are hiring people for our software business.  .NET, C++, etc.