I know some of these comments are duplicates from others; I'm only including them here for completeness of my thoughts.
- Hot keys: Please don't leave us keyboard-users out! Stuff like DEL to destroy planetary improvements & delete/obsolete ship designs; key cycling through colonies, stations, ships, etc.
- Resources tab: it's not very useful with just showing the number of resource nodes. Maybe include artifact harvesters & amounts of resources stockpiled?
- Goto button: not always reliably enabled on ships.
- Please, please an option to toggle the planetary auto-upgrade, either in-game (e.g., empire setting) or a setting outright. It's handy but not on by default.
- Related to the previous: I missed turning off one planet's auto-upgrade & it eventually built the Omega Research Building, which was annoying since it was a substantially sub-par planet for such an improvement. Could special buildings not be included in the auto-upgrade route?
- Research cloisters and galactic stock exchanges can only be built a number of times before not being able to be built any more. Is this intended? If so, could a counter be provided to keep track of the number left available to build?
- Additional indicators for special limited buildings (e.g., those that can only be built once per empire, etc.) - it's unclear to me whether or not I can build multiple copies of certain improvements.
- I have had several maps generated that had no elerium resources.
- And what's up with thulium? I've had maps with none; the few that have had it, it can't be extracted by itself, it shows up nowhere and eventually can't be extracted in conjunction with other resources. Please don't remove it - I love the idea of having the possible utility for otherwise dead planets (just like asteroids & nebula.)
- Spreadsheet-like views for managing colonies, starbases, ships and such. Sort of a combination of what was in GC2 & MOO2. In my last map, I had 175+ planets, 200+ starbases and countless numbers of ships. The side-bar is useful for monitoring & such, but isn't a robust management tool.
- Ships with multiple construction modules no longer get zapped when establishing a starbase - thank you! - but they still do when establishing a shipyard.
- Some sort of "snap" in the production wheel, at the very least the maximal points & the center (reset).
- Being able to destroy & rebuild power plants & the like is much appreciated - thank you! - but cannot do that with the Omega Research Facility nor an intimidation center that was on a planet I captured.
- Ability to jump levels of improvement upgrades: e.g., basic factory to manufacturing plant (or what-ever) without needing to go through each & every step (I'm not sure if enabling the auto-upgrade will do this or not, but I'm looking for the ability to do so manually.)
- Auto-build/upgrade options for colonies and starbases (akin to what was possible in GC2 with starbases.)
- Colored dot indicators on colonies and starbases for those that have defending fleets when zoomed out to the icon view. Would be nice to scan for unprotected colonies and bases on a grand scale.
- Carriers are crazy BA! Wow!
- In my last game, the Drengin (and the Yor to a lesser extent) spent the majority of the mid to late game declaring war on me one turn, suing for peace the very next turn, only to declare war on me the turn after that, etc. Rather annoying.
- Some sort of different color or other indication on the Turn button for after having manually clicking the end turn and any ships' automoves exhausted. I sometime lose track of whether or not it's the real end of the turn or the end of the automoves.
- I have been able to build multiple military academies on colonies under repeated circumstances.
- Scroll-bar on the side-bar is a very narrow target & easy to miss as well as drift out of when scrolling through long lists.
- Pop-up info panels are great but it'd be nice to have that information available on a click-selection too (so I can read it at my leisure without having the cats knock my mouse pointer off the hover...
- Any possibility to toggle between the current relative positioning & rotating in the ship designer & an absolute positioning & rotating? Could be very difficult I'm sure, but I have had some difficulties in designing ships due to some strange interactions with cascaded components.
- What about having the planetary management screen mapped onto a sphere that could be freely rotated like the ship designer? Nothing useful, but would maybe look kewl.
- Ability for users to create lists of names for ships, colonies, starbases, etc. for auto-generated names (just would be handy...)
- The Terran's currently using TSS as their ship designation but the intro trailer shows the The Crusader as having TASS.
- Another resource type that's extractable from rare stars? Not sure what it'd be for, but I like having to manage more than just money & people.
- Metal-planets as another type of extreme clime?
All-in-all, love the game & have been enjoying being able to contribute in whatever small manner toward its growth into one of the best games ever!