Galactic Civilizations 3 Wishlist
I'm a huge fan of a game from stardock called Galactic Civilizations 2. It's much like Sid Meier's Civilization, but a lot less boring. The new expansion, "Twilight of the Arnor" looks great, but it got me to thinking of what would I do to make the game better. This concepts in this wishlist goes for Civilization or any other turn-based strategy game as well.

The way I see it, you are acting as a head of state for a civilization. States have three major overlapping functions, Defense of Territory, Economic, and Social development. As these games go, 90% of your time is based on managing military assets. While this might be accurate for pre-industrial society, no head of state in the world controls where their military units move from day-to-day. (Except maybe Kim Chong-Il) What I would like to suggest is as much detail paid to modeling the social and economic functions of society, and a streamlining of military functions.

Economic functions.
For guidance, I would suggest looking at Superpower 2. It's a fine, if simplistic game, but the economic simulator is *worlds* better than most games. Rather than a slider that says "tax rate" that trades money for "happiness" how about separate tax rates for citizens, industry, trade, and results that compound on each other. Higher income taxes increase govt income, but reduce spending, thus dragging down consumer spending and hurting the commercial sector revenues. Raise import tarifs, drop import profits, reduce imports to tax/happiness/foreign relations/etc. How about setting interest rates to adjust inflation? How about adjusting spending on government services to promote development or save money? How about letting corporations do the R&D, trade, and building of factories? (I set priorities, they respond for max profit) And lastly, why must economics be the same for every civilization? Why does a Thalan "Hive" need money? make their economic system based on time to produce vs food or something. Let them make money for trade based on their exports. (A different system for each civ?)

Social functions.
Civilization had a good idea with different government types, but it wussed out on making them actually different. GalCiv2 doesn't even try. Sure you can research new government types, but there is no functional difference. Let your government type affect your production capabilities, research capabilities, luck, taxation, soldiering etc. How about setting laws and having them ratified by dictate/legislature/popular vote/etc and have them affect the game. I like the ethical alignment feature, but it's too simplistic. How about a 3D alignment? Liberal-Conservative, Authoritarian-Libertarian and Violent-Peaceful. (just examples) Make the effects more dramatic in terms of foreign relations, trade, etc. Also, let's retain race-types when changing planet ownership. If I genocide a planet, then it's just me, otherwise I conquer/accept/whatever a new planet WITH it's people. These people operate a bit different, etc...

Military Functions.
The Galciv governors are a good start, but they're way too simple to manage a large game. I propose the ability to create military regions. An area of space where I can centralize production, and ease Command and Control functions. Ships needn't be "owned" by a region, but it can act as a management tool. This also opens up opportunities for military coups, partisans, etc. Next, enough with the ridiculous distributed shipbuilding. Ships are big and expensive, that's something that has to be centralized to capitalize on economies of scale. Instead of 50 planets making ships that I have to individually guide, how about making shipyards that produce many ships. These ships default to a fleet. A fleet is (assigned?) to a military region and contributes to requested tasks. As an ancillary military function, intelligence plays WAY too small of a role in these games. Let me be a terrorist or spark a revolution. Let me steal technology, or pirate ships. Let me understand order-of-battle and effectively target in military engagements.

Research functions.
R&D Needn't be a government function in all races/government types. Let society do it in response to your funding allocation, or have a society that gets by ONLY stealing tech. How about random breakthroughs and a societal influence on research.

These are just a few ideas, yours for the taking. Don't be afraid of complexity, society is complex. Use the races for people that want o play differently. (dictator vs compromiser, warrior vs pacifist, etc) and the the differences become true strengths and weaknesses.