I want to start by saying, I'm older. I grew up with Stars! when it was cutting edge turn based multiplayer by email. I owned the original Homeworld and Homeworld 2, Star Trek Klingon Academy and Starfleet Command II/III, Civilization II and every Civ after. I purchased Sword of the Stars, Masters of Orion, Sins of a Solar Empire. I didn't find out about GalCiv until the 3rd one was right around the corner, so I waited till GalCiv3 came out. At first it was ok, but then it fell off for me with each DLC. I was going to give 4 a shot but after watching game play videos and reviews, I'm not going to risk the cost.
I don't want to be "that guy", your developers and team are doing things I simply cannot and I acknowledge that. That said, I think you're trying too hard to get too much into this game and not focusing on solving some of the issues of past titles, and not capitalizing on what was working in the past. I would like to offer some, hopefully constructive criticism...
Planets: Personally I think the idea of having planet tiles or the idea that planets have x amount of room is a bit silly. How big is an antimatter power plant if it takes up 2/3rds of Asia? We have 1000's of cities on earth already why does 1 take up almost all of North America? I think it would be better if planets were seen as resource nods based on physical raw resources, population, and investment a planet outputs X. The planets output or number of facilities should be a function of it's population and available resources and less a function of it's "size" represented in tiles. Instead I think it would be better if a Planet had a habitability value that influenced a number of factors like; population growth, max population, happiness, productivity, etc... instead of this planet has 9 tiles and this one has 16. I also think this could be used to give different races different preferred environments and those values influenced how many planets in the map will be habitable to that race. How hard it is to terraform them or if they even can be terraformed to meet a races needs. This will also change the early game, some races will be in a land grab mode because they share similar planetary needs with other races. Some races will be more of a build up not out because early on maybe finding a planet that is suitable is rare. As the game goes on and terraforming tech opens up opportunities to take uninhabitable planets and make them habitable. With one races habitable being another's uninhabitable; this causes an issue when a planet you have planned to capture starts getting terraformed away from your habitable parameters. Maybe uninhabitable planets are only occupiable using habitats or specialized ships that land on a planet to mine and setup a mobile operation. Perhaps they deploy into semi permanent starbases used to do various things based on the resources available on the planet. To offset this, those ships might just be expensive to run or something. I think this would open up game play a bit and make building up a more viable strategy.
Governor planets I think are really good and fit this setup well. So, say you have 1 planet that is 80% habitable, 3 planets that are between 10% and 40% and one uninhabitable planet with a habitat or minor or base, something, mining a rare material. Those low population "resource" planets should push their production and resources to the 80% which has the population to support the infrastructure required to make the best use of the resources and production to produce things. This would be the planet you build a shipyard around, or star base. This is where you build your cultural or propaganda stations and economic infrastructure that grows your empire.
The Grid Map: Does every little thing need it's own grid cell to live in? I would suggest instead of a Star being in this grid and a planet in this one making the Star a whole system with x planets to be exploited. You can setup a colony on one of the habitable planets and maybe some miners or habs on another to study something strange or mine something rare. This would free up grids for more unique spatial anomalies or unique system attributes; but more importantly give the map a sense of space. 1 sector is massive and can hold more than 1 planet or 1 asteroid field and nebula only need to be 2 or 3 cells large.
The map could be setup like Sword of the Stars where there is no grid and things move at a speed across the map per turn. So my sips move in a starlight line to a point and they complete a specific distance each turn as oppose to taking up specific cells. I like both approaches; the key point here is to give a sense of space and distance.
Special People: Why? Your empire has trillions of citizens 1 person isn't making that big of a difference and just adds pointless micromanagement.
Ship Builder: I think the ship builder is cool but if there was a way to just load up a model from blender or some other open source format I think it would be more useful.
Combat: I don't like the this ship is a guard and this ship is a fighter whatever, you need to be able to switch your tactics to the situation. Sometimes, you got a wrench and you need it to be a hammer so you make do. I like how Sword of the Stars made battles RTS but it did need some finessing. I would even say maybe battles happen on subsector board where you have combat turns to move your ships to suitable targets or deploy fighters to attack and raid things. I just think you should have more control over what your ships do and attack.
Story and Lore: I like the fact there is a story and lore built around the game but I think that should be delegated to specific story based scenarios. I think a standard game should be a you just discovered FTL now explore and the story is what you make it.
Anyway those are my thoughts; I don't mean to be a downer I really hope it helps Stardock make the best GalCiv5 they can. I'm not saying that any game I referenced was better than GalCiv3/4, in fact even though GalCiv3 was a disappointment it wasn't as big as a disappointment as Sword of the Stars I/II, Endless Space, or Civilization VI. Although my favorite games are still Sins of a Solar Empire and the Homeworld Series, they are very different games and I really am looking for a turn based empire building game set in space. I just feel like GalCiv3 got really close, then lost it's direction in the sea of DLCs and subsequent game changes. GalCiv4 didn't really seem to improve on that and added more whimsical components that I didn't feel fit the game play well.
Again this is all opinion and I'm only putting it out there in the hope that it helps.
Cheers!
