I really loved MOO and MOO2 and the Civilization series. After reading the reviews I bought the original GalCiv and didn't like it at all. I came back for GalCiV2 /w the DA expansion and found it decent but not great. Now I recently but the Twilight expansion and I still find some design issues that really keep this game from being a real successor to MOO2:

1. Combat- Giving the player some basic tactical decisions really adds some flavor to the game. The MOO series with the simple grid ala King's Bounty would not be hard to implement and would really make it much more interesting. Civilization gets around this problem by adding terrain factors and siege weaponary in addition to the rock-paper-scissors. While you can build starbases to amplify your combat stats, I find it personally very dry and bleh.

2. Games dragging on long after you have achieved overwhelming tech/spaceship superiority- I stopped playing my last Galciv game after the Terrans I was playing completely mopped up one race (5 AI and myself in a medium galaxy with all AI set on tough) and was halfway destroying a second when I just got bored. I had an unsurmountable lead in weapons/defense technology since all races were using missle weapons and I had quickly researched up the anti-missle tech tree after peeking at the various AI ships. The solution here would be for the 2nd race to simply surrender either to myself or another race rather than force me to hunt them down at every last planet. Unfortunately I saw no such option in the diplomacy menu and the AI didn't offer to despite the fact they had zero starships left and I was sending a constant stream of troop transports to the remaining planets. The first race I eradicated never offered to surrender.