The answer to  your question would involve how large each sector is.  So  your suggestions should be framed by number of stars, perhaps.

i would say more accurate combat-related descriptions, so people dont get confused. ui still says kinetic has the highest rate of fire, for example.

specifically, when a ship is orbit around a planet, and i double click on the ship and bring up it's own screen, i want to be able to see where those combat numbers are coming from. i'm still currently not sure where the weapon bonus from defending planets comes from...

oh, and an official explanation of how the combat system and growth rate both work. people are going to want to know...

For me, the planet floating UI's are too distracting, block my clicks, cover up tiles and are just generally in the way for me.  I would get a "retro planet UI" setting in the game menu that changes them to GC3 style.

One easy thing to fix before release:

We need more elerium!

Elerium: I've never seen it in the game yet...after many many hours played....much too rare. 

What are your galaxy settings for Nebulas? If you have very few nebulas you'll have very little elerium.

I have seen few nebula that have more than one elerium most stars that have resources have two or three of their type. So while the nebulas should be sparser at lower density settings the elerium should be more abundant within them.

I set my nebulas to the setting just above none, but resources to max and might get one E in three Nebs. 

This would be what I would consider sparse resources not abundant. 

Pub while you are correct that E is tied to Nebs the amount of E should be tied to the resource setting with abundant having more per Neb and Nebs having none should be rare.  

Durantium:

Early game there seems to be quite a bit of use for it, but by mid-game it seems like there could be some more serious sinks for the stuff.  For something that is the "backbone of any strong navy" (per GC3) it sure doesn't seem like you need much of it.  Maybe if you could sink some into every hull type to +hp, this would make sense for a resource in the amount that I tend to accumulate it. 

Thulium:

Also there seems to be generally more available than can be used...

Prometheon:

In my experience this is rare, although I haven't played much lately.  My last 0.91 game there were only 4 prometheon spread across 1/2 the galaxy to be fought over by 9 different civs.  So that's anything but plentiful. 

Elerium:

Doesn't seem to be super-uncommon, but finding lodes of >1 seems to be pretty rare.  In my current 0.92 game however, I do not believe I have any, so all the above posts might be onto something (Nebulula = common (along with all of the galaxy settings))..

I just completed and lost by 20% prestige Max game 1 of each race opponent. Norm diff; all settings max. I was Iconian and lost to out of range Torian. Boy the Iconian science seems to not outweigh its other loss of other stats. 

In this game I noticed that by late-mid to late game:

My 7 fleets containing Commanders. Some reason the commander ships, foremost the lower their logistic cost the sooner it happened, the enemy would target commander ships. I would keep losing commanders as the only loss. These are fleets 32-66 range in that game as it progressed that I noticed it. 

Are commanders suppose to head the spear and die first? Is it just the smaller logistic ship despite HP making them a target? When you level up lower ship logistics that may be a bad thing to do?

I don't like losing commanders. If they are meant to be targets I probably shouldn't add them to fleets. 

Please explain.

I advocate a "patrol" command (go back and forth between point A and point B, stopping if you see a hostile), but since there is not yet a built-in mechanism for stopping automated actions at this time, it wouldn't work yet.

I would like the addition of a guard command -- guard = I don't come back to life until the player actually does it.  Versus sentry where they wake up when an enemy comes around.

Frogboy nailed it. Ship does not come back to life on its own. Sentry reacts to the presence of enemy ships, while guard does not.

Its kind of a play style choice. Some people love sentry, while others would like something more permanent. I find myself, time to time, pressing spacebar make a fleet skip a turn (and lose all remaining movement points) when a guard command would have worked better.

To counter criticism, I think that if you need sentry to be aware of enemy ships, then you are not paying attention.

I care little for the name. I use guard because that was its name in GalCiv 3. In GalCiv 2, I asked many times for a fortify command because guard worked like sentry does now, and sentry woke up when any* ship got in range.

*any being any ship that does not belong to my civ.

Ships can get hidden pretty easily, behind a planet banner, in an asteroid, on top of an anomaly, behind stars (even when you look top down), and sometimes they even camouflage when having a similar color to you or another civ.