I like your ideas. I had similar thoughts, myself. It would be nice to see the minor races expanded, especially in terms of allowing us to make/break alliances (currently, you can not break an alliance with a minor race) and allowing us to engage in espionage on them. Allowing them to join the UP would be an awesome random event or generic UP vote. I'm not entirely sure such a thing could be modded in, however. The game's modability is rather limited, especially compared to Civ 4.

The governments are extremely limited, unfortunately. It would be nice to see more political and governmental content. Alpha Centauri's social engineering still stands as one of the best features I've seen in a "4X" game, though Civ 4 does come close, with its civics.

In fact, most games today are still lacking features that were in MOO2 and Alpha Centauri. Unfortunate, really.

3-Greater Political Activity - Why dont planets hold votes for independence from Empires (in a federation obviously), a greater array of powers should be available (ie Martial Law, Prisoner Release etc).

Speaking of, I made an olde post about this.https://forums.galciv2.com/?ForumID=247&AID=104368#953709

Well sorry...i've only been on the site for about 20 minutes...havent had time to read through all the previous threads.

Getting back to the topic at hand, I just think not enough has been changed from GC + The Altarian Propehcy. The Random Events, The topics of the UP and alot of the other stuff is basically the same. It would be nice to have different problems to deal with and different methods of dealing with them. Stuff like, instead of invading a planet conventionally, you could simply encourage a coup d'etait or have spies conduct terrorist activities...nothing too special, just different.

True, they need new events. You can mod new events, but I don't know how to.

They need stuff like black holes, permanent wormholes, nebula, and radiation poisoning in ships.

PS: your personal icon isn't working. also, check out that link above, it needs much renewing, its pretty old before I bumped it. Posts get old and put in the back of the forum so we "bump" the post the bring it back up.

There's rebelling and then there's legitimate democratic independence but that may just be me being pedantic. I just think think things are too dependent on external influences and perhaps internal defection/independence would also benefit the game.

Politics and Diplomacy defenitely need to be strengthened though, that's one part of the game that has barely been altered from the original. Even the parties are the same.

On one of my first goes on GalCiv2, the Jessians dominated the Galaxy, they destroyed the Dominion of Korx, Drengin Empire and very nearly my own civ, and they are a minor race. I just dont believe that custom races should start with a seat at the UP and classification as a major race, I think it should be earned.

A couple of these ideas will be addressed. There have been threads talking about expanding diplomacy and other race modification stuff. The expansion pack adds some of those features. Also, the game receives pretty regular updates that resolve bugs but also expand the game so you may get a pleasant surprise down the road.

Personally, I'm pretty impresssed with the depth of the game as it stands. I think the ship editor is really amazing. My only complaint right now is some of the features not working the way I think they should. But, they're not huge issues and I figure they'll probably get addressed as the game matures. Which is good because this is the one video game that I've not played through once and got rid of. GalCiv2 in not unique in that sense, but it's the most replayable game I've experienced. That gives you value for your $40.

As far as more events, there are lots of events already. I don't really see where adding more would be of benefit to the experience. I *would* like to see all minors have unique portraits. It's a little cheesy when you get the virtually the same portrait for two different races.

As far as minors graduating to majors, I don't think that would be something worthy of the programming effort. If you want more oppenents, simply enable more majors. With all races enabled even in a gigantic universe, things are pretty busy. Don't really need minors added to the crowd, but I have to admit it would be interesting.