Just found out about this game today, and I am incredibly exited! This is something I posted a while back in the Galactic Civ 2 forums. Of course, at the time a third game was only a remote possibility for me, but now I'm re-posting it so that it's at least in the right place on the chance some of this might be useful.
Ok, I really do love this game. I got it a long time ago and have played it on and off, but there have been a few, ever present problems for me.
The space battles just don't cut it. Often I really can't tell who's shooting and whose shot with beam weapons. Missiles and mass drivers will fly up, stop when they get to their target, and then blow up a second later. Worst of all, weapons do not rotate and will literally shoot out the wrong way, or right through their ship. Weapons absolutely either all need to be turret-style, or there need to be firing arcs. Ideally, we should have both--fixed weapons and turrets, with the former only being able to shoot where the ship's pointing. Armour and Missile Defences are just different coloured shields.
The ship design also never turns out as well as I think it will. You just...slap some parts on and it's actually pretty hard for me to make the design look good or original. It is also not quite as in-depth as I'd like. For example, has anyone heard of the game Star ruler? In that game, you have for example power generators, a bridge, life supoort, ammo caches, and how big or small these things are actually makes a difference. The downside is you can't change the actual shape of the ship, you can't really chose where subsystems go and all the ships look pretty much the same, not to mention pretty bad graphics. However, you have so much design flexibility. If you want you can do a load of research into one weapon type, construct a massive ship with a massive weapon and use it as a death-star. Give your life-support systems an emergency generator so that the crew doesn't die if main power is disabled in combat, or if you want just make the ship a drone.
My point: I'd really like to see a sort of combination of these two games: what I feel Galactic Civ should have been. I'd really like to see this game modernised, even though I love it as it is anyway. Give us sins of a solar empire's battles, more complex design options and have all those options mean something.
And now I think of it, here's some other ideas of mine:
Land battles. Another thing I really want to see in this version is the ability to customize your land forces as you customize your starships. I want the option to design modular infantry and vehicles. I'm not talking about aestetic deign, I mean building your ground units from, well, the ground up, just like you do with starships. Options to choose between making at a walker or having it levitate, or having a flying vehicle, would add a lot of depth to the customization. I want to see all three weapons types--missiles, mass drivers and beams, transferred to ground combat, as well as being able to use armour, shields and point defence. There also needs to be different types of weapons--from heavy rocket launchers and railguns to more standard beam weapons to handheld phasers, I want to be able to chose. Most of all, I want to see it all in a 3D environment, and in general be as polished and in-depth as things are in space.
Another big feature I want to see is the ability to control your units. Not really much to say about this one--I just thing being able to actually take charge and make tactical as well as strategic decisions will add a lot to the game.
So, here's a summary of my main ideas, in order of priority
-Updated graphics and combat mechanics
-More meaningful and in-depth customization, extending to more than just weapons, defences and engines and having size make a difference.
-Ground combat visuals to match space. Make it 3D at the very least.
-Customization for ground units--not necessarily as in-depth as space, but still sophisticated.
-Research for ground units
If this game can do these things, then I am confident it will be successful. I know this is very early, but from what little info is available on the features, I'm a little worried. There really doesn't seem to be anything new here. Personally, I think that this game needs to bring in some innovations to compete with the other stuff on the market, because the amount of features that made a good game back when 2 was released does not cut it now. I hope that this can be helpful in some way.