First I like the look of the game so far. but the ship designer has some flaws. first it does not let you change the view angle as did GC2. also while in the designer, the ships would disappear or the design grid would glitch out, especially after deleting or obsoleting a design.

another crash occurred with a colony ship on auto pilot to a planet. the game would completely crash if the ship autoed into the world during auto movement, but if I sent the ship next to the planet, them moved it in manually, it did fine.

A couple of suggestions:

the dead worlds should be mine-able [like asteroids] and /or outposts placed on them, say like a starbase but different, maybe more modules or some buildings.

Many of the other aspects of the game I really like, Acquiring tech is somewhat cumbersome and not realistic. This is one of my biggest beefs with these types of games. If we could allow research percentages similar to the tax/production rates. One could put all into say engineering, or have say 10% go to Colonization 30% go to Engineering, 40% go to Military and 20% got to Influence, this would be more realistic, as research can come from different directions and funding for research comes from different sources and goes to different goals. this would also allow more customized gameplay.