1. I like the part where in Diplomacy you can create treaties with AI so, for example, if you get attacked, they will help you, or expect you to help them if someone attacks you. Also like how having good enough relationship allows you to engage into a mutually beneficial trading. Likewise they should have the "memory" to know if you broke pacts with them in the past and this label you as untrustworthy which would make future pacts more difficult to establish. Tech trading I like the least because you can easily exploit AI players and get all the good techs by trading with multiple of AI players and trade them less useful technologies. Such as for example +Influence technologies in a game where there is no influence win enabled.

2. I like games on big maps with lots of empires. So my games typically last hundreds of turns. Never counted them though so not sure what the exact number is.

3. For me, what makes a 4X strategy good or bad, is a healthy mix of interesting combat and empire management. You don't have to have tactical combat but it needs to have depth to it so there are many ways to build a good fleet, not just biggest guns/defence. MOO 2 did it well by having weapons which had other primary effects beside damage, like shutting the target ship down for a short period or bypassing shield and armor or sending raiding parties. Gal Civ 3 seems to be almost exclusively about how much damage you can dish out and how much damage you can take/avoid/regenerate. I suppose that is because it is difficult to create an AI which takes advantage of other more complicated elements.

Empire management is equally important to make the stay interesting for long periods of time and not be just about combat. For that to work there has to be a lot of strategical elements and a good AI to be able to handle all those strategical elements. For example, resource management in GC III is very interesting but could have a bigger impact than it currently does. However, only empire management, tends to turn boring as it is then mostly about numbers, how many planets you have, how many credits you make etc. So you really need both to have a good 4X strategy game.

I'd suggest to watch out for ' Endless Space 2 ' if you want several political streams inside your empire. So far it is announced Q1 2016.

1. Going to war and convincing others to fight a war.

Ai doesn't take ship range into account when declaring war, it seems to just judge military power above being able to invade.

2. Thats really a hard one going to really anything beyond 300 turns isn't fun if the AI isn't smart enough.

3. Galciv 2 was good, at least in terms of spying, influence was a bit better for UP. Ai didn't have to worry about correctly placing tiles. Sins of a solar empire was great in terms of the content from the xpacks and the pricing. Civ 4 was good with all its content and Civic options for government ideology in Galciv3 really just felt like the whole good vs evil which I really don't like. Civ 5 was much worse then Civ 4 but its combat was fantastic and made it rather fun and worthwhile.

Galciv3 Really suffers from poor combat with a simple attack and defence system, though the addons you can later get seem to add depth they cost valuable rare resources. Would love to see the combat further improved and the movement and range tweaked. Fleet engagements feel a bit odd with the logistic system that makes it a bit awkward, a tile should be limited to the logistic cap and more then one fleet should be able to attack a target if they're adjacent to it.

Movement is far too free, theres no choke points, military starbases should stop movement of hostile fleets unless they attack it. Ship range should go off from the star systems so that deep space with almost no stars are hard to explore. Even a supply system so fleets can go outside the range for a few turns before needing to recharge might make that fun. That might make maps like tight clusters and spiral much more interesting and tactical. Might make the ship with the fleet wide ship range a valuable asset.

On ships control of fighter and drone designs and even bombers being added to carriers would also be good. Also being able to upgrade the starting survey ship as better things get researched would be wonderful as well.

I am very much the same.