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The second release Friday night went a very long way towards making GC2 a very enjoyable game. In fact, I had one game that easily rates in my top 5 games of GC1/MOO2/MOO3, and I've played hundreds of each (except MOO3, only dozens of games there)
I posted a few ideas I had for improving the experience in a seperate thread, as I want to focus on what is already there in this thread.
The stability is greatly improved, to the point that I managed a cultural win on a gigantic galaxy set to 9 opponents at normal difficulty. I still see CDTs (always paired with corrupt autosave files so i can't continue) if the game lasts too long, however, but before, I couldn't finish Tiny maps.
I think Influence might be a little overpowering if someone designs a race for it, though it seems reasonable otherwise. Either the benefits of the racial influence pick should be reduced, or the cost should be increased, in my opinion. I also think you might want to restrict the range of influence a bit more, thought the first suggestion might take care of this as well, as the only time I saw this was when I optimized everything for influence. I kid you not, I was flipping planets that my survey ship didn't have enough range to reach. NOT a common occurance, but I don't think it should have happened to begin with, even with all the optimizations I made.
I think that starship foundries should come earlier in the tech tree, or at least something else along those lines should. As is, Omega Starship Shipyards(?) are the FIRST thing in the tech tree for improving starship quality.
On a similar note, there are far too many "break points" in the improvement upgrade paths. If these "break points" are intended to stay, then it's going to inflict micromanagement on the players. Personally, I think that (almost) everything that isn't limited to "one-per-race" or "one-per-game" should have at least a placeholder available at the start of the game. and that these placeholders should upgrade all the way through to the best improvements of the same type. Trade Centers seem to break down at "Advanced Trade Centers", Labs seem to break down at "Research Centers", and because of the difficulty of overcoming those, i don't even know if the later improvements along those lines of development upgrade each other or not. Having to go through and manually replace Research Centers with Research Academies or Invention Matrix' is a pain.
There's also a number of cases where either the effectiveness of different improvements needs to be adjusted, or the effects need to be different. For example, I may be missing something, but I can't imagine any reason to build Stock Exchanges, as the improvements that come from the prerequisite techs offer a larger bonus. It also bothers me that at least some of the later improvements are less cost effective.
I think the area of influence of mining starbases needs to be increased (assuming that my understanding is correct, resources no longer affect you empire-wide). I play with Abundant Everything, and I'd still say that at best, 25% of the resources I beat the AI to has one of my colonies within range of it. If I had to guess, I'd say half of the resources don't have ANY inhabitable planets within their area of affect. In GC1, resources could make or break you, and often decided which approach you took (I'll never forget the game of GC1 I played where I started off with two military resources within initial sensor range of Earth, and all of the military resources were in my initial colonization area. That's the game where I learned that while my preferred game may be peaceful empire building, the occasional change of pace "Goosestep early and often" game can be a blast as well:) ). In GC2, they're barely worth bothering with, so far.
It would also seem that the effects of Soil Enhancement/Habitat Improvement/Terraforming don't stack on PQ9 or less planets. I would expect having both Soil Enhancement and Habitat Improvement available to my to allow me to make 1 square of a PQ9 colony (20% of 9, 1.8, rounded down to 1) usable via Habitat Improvement (or even require I do both). As is, a PQ9 planet never sees any improvements even if all three techs are available.
I'm not sure what to make of Eyes of the Universe. I loved it in GC1, but the GC2 version seems rather useless. Trying to look for ships on the minimap on a Gigantic map is down right frustrating. This might be better if there were some way to scroll the minimap, but as is, it's just too much effort. I've noticed that the main map shows some ships that I wouldn't have otherwise seen (with or without EotU, but much more common with), but it is far from usable that way as I've had transports within one move of an ungarissoned planet that didn't show up.
The AI needs work, but is already better than some released products 
In particular, I found a few cases that the current AI doesn't deal at all well with. It seems that if a colony is defended by only a colony ship (this probably isn't the exact trigger, I've only seen it three times), the AI will build a huge stack of ships next to the planet but never attack. Above and beyond that, something else odd is going on there, as that causes long delays while waiting for the "next turn" button to return. As soon as peace is declared, the "next turn" button would start returning almost instantly, instead of 30 seconds or more later. In the case where this was most noticable, there were still several wars going on with active shooting, so I am inclined to believe that it was this specific behavior causing the long delay, and that the delay was significanly larger than normal AI thinking.
The AI also needs to be more patient with its colony ships. I never drop a colony ship on a planet until I know I've seen all the inhabitable planets of that star or someone elses colony ship is in the area (I've considered equipping my colony ships with sensors to make this easier, it's that important). Even early game, it's only a handful of weeks extra time for the colony ship to scout the other planets. The AI, on the other hand, is perfectly willing to drop a colony ship on a class 8 planet when there's a class 16 planet two squares farther away. I'd lose a lot more races to high PQ planets if the AI would take it's time to ensure it's making the right decision. One optimization of that is if you click on a star and it says that it has two inhabitable planets, and you've already seen two, you can end your search right there.
The AI is "burn it to the ground" invasion happy. I had a class 11 planet reduced to a class 6 planet because of repeated sucessful invasions using PQ-reducing tactics on the AI's part.
Last AI note: Since users can now design ships, the AI is going to have to deal with a lot more contingencies. Let me describe that really intense, really enjoyable game I mentioned so that you can understand at least one of them.
I was cornering the tech market in a gigantic, 9 opponent game. I had every tech that anyone else had, better miniturization, plus all the diplomacy techs and a full generation (several techs each) of beam weapons and shields over anyone else. Then the Yor declared war. I'm not sure how they came up with a single ship (class) that could eat three of my best ships and not take damage without the techs to build Starship Foundries and such, but I was knocked out of the military game fast. I lost a few colonies because I couldn't keep them garrisoned even buying ships every turn.
Then I changed tactics. I noticed that the AI would only send in fleets of transports, or a single transport mixed into a primarily-combat fleet. So I sold off some techs for some operating capital, bought aphrodisiacs (so that I could quickly recover from those single transports that I stood no chance of stopping) and started pumping out interceptors to take out the transport-only fleets that could have taken my colonies. Before that game CDT'd and left me with corrupt saved games, I was pushing out small ships with 5 attack, no defense, a speed of 10 (counting the impulse and gravity accelerator bonuses), a sensor range of 16 (meaning that even if a Yor ship started off outside my sensor range, I could move straight towards it at full speed and it still couldn't reach me in its next turn), and enough range that they coudn't be cornered.
Talk about an intense game. Any mistake moving a ship resulted in the loss of that ship, but I still managed to make sure that noone that declared war on me got an unescorted transport, starbase, or any other low attack, low defense ship anywhere near my planets. I was even using them for offensive action before too long, commerce and starbase raiding areas that any human player would have considered reasonably secure in the absense of these raiders.
On the other hand, any human player of any reasonable skill level would have stopped chasing the interceptors and started using those nasty ships that were both the rock and the hard place as transport escorts, with a single combat ship escorting multiple transports. I wouldn't have lasted long.
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