Really the game is made to be modded. Look at the awesome work of mods made for GCII and go from there. We will get 'one button' install on mods coming up but will likely be near Xmas. 

We have a forum where you can go to and get mods. That is FAR better than some games (looks at Xcom) which is a pita to get mods dl'd and installed. 

The base game is horrible. I only play modded.

I play a quick small - medium map if the changelog warrants it but my main games are always modded.

I hate the choices that the devs are making so modding is the way out for me.

If GC3 had no modding I wouldn't play it.

My attitude is I'm not even going to look at a mod until Stardock tell us they're done with GalCiv3: No more patches, No more DLC, No more expansions. I know what I'd like GalCiv3 to be and that is most assuredly isn't there yet but I'm putting my money on Stardock doing something about that before I go into "where's a mod that'll make the AI do this, that..." mode.

Disclaimer. The above opinion is in no way influenced by the author's comparitive inability to download and install any aforementioned "mods". Any ineptness taken by any  reader of the above post is not inferred or implied by the author.

The author has always preferred rockers to mods, anyway. Yep, showing my age there...

The only thing that i mod is my starting ships when playing on Godlike mode.

For me, the game is much too young to even look at mods yet.  I'm enjoying the game occasionally, but won't take it very seriously for another 6 months or so.  Too much is still in flux!

I'm more than occupied enough with the vanilla incarnation. There's plenty to do and learn there. I see no need to mod anything yet. I will say though I have yet to suffer a massive-scale AI invasion, depite it declaring war on me all the time...