Since i first got into GC games somewhere around dreadlords, i always felt like the galaxy was kind of empty and boring.

I Found it weird that planets were either colonize-able or just empty boring useless dots on your screen that once discovered you could just forget you ever were there.

If you started in a corner with a few sectors behind you and you discovered there was nothing of interest there you would just keep pushing the line and most of the game would concentrate around the border.

I also thought that it was really fun to use your flagship to go where no Korath has gone before in the beginning of the game. But as your economy picked up and you got your mind to more pressing matters the sense of discovery and exploration just went away. And what could possibly be a great activity on the side faded with that.

There were always ideas floating around my head for gas giant planets and how it would be cool to build mining bases in their asteroid fields or in orbit to mine helium 3 or something of that sort. 

Proximity of asteroids plays a great deal into where i decide to plant my next forge world, and it would be cool if helium mining bases on gas giants provided scientific production points to the selected destination in the same way asteroid mining bases provide other production to planets. This would force more deliberation on a player to choose where to plant his Lab worlds, and could possibly lead to some extremely lucky moments when you find a purple star with one planet containing many tiles and rest are just gas giants.

Flagship could possibly be upgraded with survey probe bays. So instead of just setting your flagship on auto and forgetting about till the rest of the game you would send your surveyor to different uninhabited planets and drop probes that would scan the orbits/surface/soil for precursor space platforms/temples/tombs, pirate bases and stuff like that. Surveyor will be hailed by the probe at the end of its scanning cycle and you would have to go back to recover the data and see if it found anything. By creating some new exploratory events you could keep the events going even after all the planets have been settled.

Planets with moons attached could also have a few tiles on the moon for construction of repair bases, or some kind of super cannon that would aid your fleet in combat in the sector or during invasion or increase the planetary defense strength. I know it sounds allot like a star base  but it would be less tedious without the hassle of those constructors and could be handled by the planets social production instead.

Tell me what you think about this, and feel free to add something, this is pretty much a suggestion box/brainstorming session.

P.S. Yet again sorry for any grammar mistakes.