Hi everybody,

I think it would be too presumptious for me submit my fist post in "Furure Ideas" subforum.  So I decided to write this here first.

I played GalCivII long ago (and liked it). Recently I purchased GalCivIII while it was on sale and spent the whole weekend playing it. Honestly, I really like this game, but I found that playing it again becomes more and more painful because of micromanagement and some other minor issues. I still haven't completed even one playthrough, because these issues keep snowballing as my empire grows.

Please correct me if I got something wrong, but I found the following issues:

Issue 1: Too much planet micromanagement.

It seems obvious that planets should have their focus (manufacturing/money/research). Also, every planed needs production to build and upgrade planetaty improvements. For example, let's pick a research-focused planet. As soon as there aren't any upgrades, I want it to go 100% research. If there are upgrades available, I need to slide it's production to 50%research/50%manufacturing and then slide it back to 100% research as soon as upgrades are built. Manualy. Research project doesn't resolve this issue, because it isn't effective enough.

Solution: production redistribution projects that will automatically redistribude production or manufacturing slider while planet doesn't build anything:

Research redistribution: puts 100% into research.

Financial redistribution: puts 100% into money.

Military redistribution: puts 100% of manufacturing into military.

Issue 2: Too many techs.

Actually, this is not bad. It gives some space to experiment with features like tech-stealing or getting enemy's techs when capturing planets (hope we'll see this in future) without breaking game balance. However, it makes tech trading painful because it also requires to balance techs on both sides to make tech trade "fair".

Of course, it is possible to disable tech trading, but this makes game too slow.

Solution: tech exchange agreement, which will automatically share equal portions of researched techs between players.

Issue 3: Galaxy map is difficult to use.

This may be subjective, but navigating and understanding this map seems to be problematic. Most importand objects like planets or fleets are uninformative. First of all, there are too many unhabitable planets that just confuse me while I looking for my planets. Inhabited planets have icons describing their owner, but they are too small. Fleets have to be distinguished by ship color sheme instead of some obvious thing like logo or owner's banner. When empire grows large, it should be more convenient to use strategic view, but in this case it becomes more difficult because fleets are lost on background and planets don't use your color scheme at all. Another funny thing is that stars are viewed as the most large object, but it is not really important to know where they are in the mid-to-lategame. 

Solution:

1. Option to hide unhabitable planets or, at least, make them transparent.

2. Banners for fleets.

3. Inhabited planets highlighting in both normal and strategic view.

4. Solid icons for starbases and fleets in strategic view.

5. Filters to disable unimportant things in strategic view.

Thank you for reading and sorry for my bad English!