One of the things I was most dissapointed with about Galciv II is the fact they have not upgraded the political system at all since Galciv I. It's still the same pointless system of a single starting out party that gives you bonuses and a set of parties who simply give you penalties to lose power to. I suggest that the following improvement be made to the system..............

1. An end to the above mentioned system. Instead if "you" are elected out of of power your civilizations ruling party changes and you replace your old party bonus with those of the new party.

2. A system of morale based on the population evaluation of how well you rule, not just taxes and circuses.

Primerily it must be remembered that casualties in wars are not popular with the population, keep feeding ships at an opponant which then die horribly will likely result in your population getting very upset at what they see as a needless loss of life at the hands of a callous goverment. However doing well in wars, crushing enemies and destroying hordes of enemy craft with little loss of your own tends to increase your population morale. This is further modified by the size of the ships bieng destroyed (large battleships have more effect on public opinion than tiny fighters) and the odds. Generally speaking the weaker you are in strength in relation to your foe, the more forgiving they are of losses and the more joyous they are of successes, the opposite also applies. Unless you are evil, things are also affected by the populations veiw of the justness of the war, if the enemy attacked you, then your population are more forgiving than the other way around. If you came to the aid of an ally, they are almost as forgiving.

AI players with a low morale should be more eager to seek peace as a result.

The population also compares your success in other areas relative to the civilization which are your civilizations main enemies. If you hate the Drengin and the Drengin exceed you in both current technology and amount of research, then this has a major effect on population morale. The same applies to economy, influence and most other things, the population is most concerned about your position relative to your main enemies, not your friends.

Each party is expected to excel at a certain areas by the electorate, the warparty is expected to wage war well, the pacifists are expected to avoid war and so on. What you aren't good at effects what share of the unhappy population different parties get, if your militery is weak in relation to your enemies or you lost a war of defense, the war party will be elected, while if you launched unsuccessful wars of agression the pacifists will be elected.

Once in power, the party in charge is as I said expected to do certain things and not do others. War Parties that fail to generate success on the battlefield and lose wars are likely to suffer badly in popularity. However they get less penalty when launching wars of agression. Pacifists on the other hand get massive penalties when launching wars of agression, while less penalty for losing wars. However they do recieve penalties to morale if you have potential upgrades and developments and your social production is low.

3. The party in charge effects the AI behavior of other civilizations. The behavior adopted by AI's should reflect the beliefs of the party that rules them. War parties tend to build large militeries and attack civilizations they don't like, while pacifists tend to focus on improving relations and are generous with gifts. Technologists focus on researching technology, industrialists build lots of industry and so on. Most often you can predict the likely course of a civilization by analysing what party rules it at the moment.

4. Leaders and leader traits. Each civilization has an original leader, he/she is created at the game's start and has a handpicked set of traits. Traits come in good and bad, some traits add to the abilities of your civilization in various areas, a talented scientist civ leader adds to your research ability, while a technophobe subtracts from it. You can decide whether your leader is male or female (some races don't have males and females though), this is purely cosmetic, though maybe it could effect stuff like trading screens and whether your leader is reffered to as he or she or it .

Age is not purely cosmetic, it somewhat affects how much starting experiance you start off with, experiance increases the effect of the leaders positive traits. The longer a leader rules, the more experiance he collects, the rate you gain experiance is of course greater when you are leader relative to time-frame than what you have simply from experiance. Leaders age in game also. However the older you are, the more chance you have of getting ill and retiring, the higher the chance that an assasination will succeed in killing you. Different races age at different rates, when the race reaches his maximum age he automaticly retires (if he is still alive).

Age range for races leaders. Experiance gain for being of a certain age proportianate, no race gains any real bonus from this except immortal precursors.

Human- 18-110
Arcean- 40-240
Drath- 50-300
Torian- 6-65
Thalan- 10-90
Korx- 50-300
Drengin- 20-150
Yor- 0-250
Altaria- 18-110
Iconion- 50-300
Precursor (dread lords and Arnor)- 1000-immortal
Morgemil- 50-300
Carinoids- 20-120
Alexians- 14-80
Scottlingas- 18-110
Snathi- 10-70

When making your initial leader, you have a certain number of bonus trait points to assign and a certain number of penalty points. You can volunterily add penalty points in order to earn bonus points. Each trait has three levels of severity, which effects how much it effects abilities.

If a new party takes power, a new leader is randomly generated for you to play, you don't have any control over what traits he/she has or how old he/she is, or even whether it is a he or a she. The traits a leader has tends to reflect their party, a war party leader will tend to be knoweledgable of weaponry, but will often be a xenophobe. The game should most often create mediocre leaders, than particularly bad or good ones and should tend to make medium aged leaders instead of ones that are very old or very young.

While you are alive, you have six randomly generated leaders to pick from to be your successor, three males and three females (where this is applicable). This will again tend to reflect your party. Your successor can die however if he/she does so, another six random leaders are created for you to choose from. If you die and have chosen no successor an entirely random leader is created as though you had lost an election to that party.