I, for one, certainly hope the rest of the tech tree remains to be added in, because at the moment, it feels like half is missing, and its a pell-mell rush to the end of the tree long before terraforming is over.

"I said the same thing about Elemental. It only took two free expansions and an extra year (or more) of development for them to release something approaching the game they were promising right around this stage of development."

It's because of the Elemental disaster that I have faith they won't make that mistake ever again.

+1 on Simultaneous Multiplayer.

Also this game needs the option to set difficulty levels per "human" player, not just per AI. When playing with friends I have a lot of experience with the galciv series but some of my friends don't, this leads to unequal game play.

The issue for me is two fold.

How predictable the game plays.
How repetitive the same actions are with no thought involved, thought is crucial and more weight needs to be given to every decision, with more consequences.

Techs:

The number of techs isn't the problem, it's the frequency of them. Slow down tech pacing and you'll not only have a longer game but also make each discovery more meaningful.
Though I do agree, some of those % numbers, should be actual techs not just bonuses. 

Planets:

I would partially agree with planets in this regard too, only we get to tweak their frequency already.

So a simple concept, have a tweak to planet titles in the starting game screen. Bonus tiles to each planet, -5 to +5 (or more), with a slight decrease in overall planet availability (1 step down abundant becoming common, common becoming occasional etc ), with one higher setting added past abundant for those who liked all the old options.

Fun:

Random events will help make the game more fun when they get here. - Including invasions or rebellions. I am hoping for example, for another dimension aka moo2, with a few simple star clusters which can appear.

AI's need more personality, and different playstyles, so we have to play differently against the different races. This runs all the way through them from their dialogue, through to their behavior at a strategic level.

Also of course the more AI empires there are, for me, the more interesting and unpredictable the games become. This is why I am looking forward to really large scale games, and think that will bring the 4x experience I always dreamed of . Space empires IV for example was great with, what was it 20 players? A modern game with 50+ players will be amazingly unpredictable.

Diplomacy: 

Needs more factors, to make games more unpredictable.

I said ideology in one thread, but there are many other possibilities. Others have said for example, recently flipped a planet, being a negative modifier against who you took it from. Another obvious one from the old games is, mega power. If you are over-dominant as a superpower, other races might resent you and try to band together. If you are tiny, diplomatic neighbors who like you might try to make you a proxy state or give you limited autonomy under their control rather than wipe you out.

Rebellions within a faction, so you have two of them, the old empire and the rebels. Rebellions which you can help start up.

I've argued the multiple UP or large multi-alliance angle to death in the other thread, this would add another multi-alliance area of diplomacy. If this doesn't fly, then just as the name reads multi alliances, space empires V tried it and failed but perhaps the galciv team can do better they did great when it was based around ideologies in previous titles.

Trading factions might dislike you if you are out trading them.

Warlike factions might dislike (disrespect) you if you are always at peace. The opposite for diplomatic factions. <- This can be done by ideology or this method if people prefer. 

Warlike factions should require breathing room, and get a negative mod on their neighbors when they run out of space. When I start next to the dregin, I REALLY want to think holy hell I'm next to the drengin.

 

Yes, and that will help a lot, as in one of my points there.

But I wrote factors , not merely just factions. 

It's fine if I don't win, as long as a cool story plays out during the game

Personally I think 100 AI empires is going to be hard to run in a long game because of the memory required if 6 empires is topping 4 gigs, let's assume 12 will be around 8 and so on (though I doubt its going to be as much as double). If we get 30 - 50 playing comfortably I will be ecstatic, even more so if its moddable so as hardware gets better, we can just add more.

Back to the point, rather than just the player snowballing, several AI opponents will be there to challenge you.

That is the reason I enjoy these big 4x games, like space empires IV, or the paradox CK or EU series, the challenge. They will of course be challenging themselves too , so it's not an us vs them mentality, unless you are really unlucky and all the AI empires are friends. 

I have to agree about the micro, its bad enough mid to late game when you have dozens of planets and get a new terraforming tech. This is one of the reasons I want terrafomers to be something along the lines of you build a terraforming platform on an tile that will open up but hasn't yet and over years the planet becomes Earth-like with more tiles opening up as time goes by.  Have this in 3 tiers, one habitable to Earth-like, Earth-like to paradise and extreme to habitable off the extreme planet line.  The Yor would just care about more tiles not Earth like so adjust theirs so the planets move from Earth-like to extreme but have more usable tiles.

I am thinking (well as always when I say that caution is in order)  that a huge page file should be sufficient to handle a  big game.   If 8 gb is enough a dozen AIs then a 64 gb page file would allow about a 100.   I don't think 100 is out of reach at all, unless I am all wet, of course.    Rather the issue will be that the alien turns will take a while.  And perhaps getting the AI to be relatively as intelligent on a big map might be a much bigger issue than on a small map, because of the enormously larger number of possibilities for diplomacy (especially trading). 

I reallly hope that big maps will be workable though, sounds like a lot of fun, and as has been mentioned, whether one wins or not isn't really the issue, it's whether the journey is fun.

(... I am going down, dang it, but I am taking out the $%^& Drengin first!!)

In the dev stream they've talked about as each round of larger maps comes in they make more optimization improvements as well.  Hopefully by the time they have the largest map size in the game will run much more efficiently than it does now.  I assume by the time they are implementing dozens to 100 factions to a map it will run about as fast as it does now for all of those factions.  At worst most of what's happened will be off screen so at least it won't have to render it.

I don't know about you guys but i plan to have one long epic game going that might last a month, and a few short games in between. The long epic game will be my version of a campaign.