I'm sure there are many threads about this already, but my wishlist for GC3 would include a few things that I thought would be useful for strategy.

In no particular order:

1. temp/gravity/radiation/atmosphere/etc properties on planets that would make them more habitable to one race vs another.  This would increase the complexity of terriforming code because a class 20 planet for the terrans might have the following properties:

temp: 20-35C, radiation: 80-100, gravity: 1.0, atmosphere: Oxygen

Where as a Drengin might be:

30-60C, radiation 120-160, gravity: 1.7, atmosphere: Methane

I've actually come up with formulas for calculating a planet's habitability as a delta% from ideal conditions.  The farther away from idea, the lower the PQ.

2. Starbases that can actually act as unmovable ships that can fire on invading ships.  They have specialized(expensive) weapon platforms that allow attacking from 1-2 spaces away depending on the techs.  It would allow the building of bases to defend territory rather than increasing a fleet's stats.

3. A good map editor.

4. A first party mod tool(assists in making changes to base files and saves them as mods).  This would allow you to add races, techs, events, etc.  I doubt the dev team is creating everything in XML out of notepad, so maybe access to the tool or a stripped tool used to set everything up would be nice.

5. Tactical combat.  Real time battles.  Something similar to Space Empires 5 or(even better) one like Galactic Imperia II{if i'm getting the title right}  Old game, perhaps early to mid 1990s.  Also a game speed so that the 4x turn based game was actually real time(except for tactical combat, where it would pause until resolved).  I realize that tactical combat gives an advantage to the player, however, I believe that advances in AI are such that it can probably be made more competitive, especially if the tactical combat was in real time rather than turn based.

Brian

PS: Notice, no MP.