I've been playing GalCiv 3 for several months now and it has quickly become one of my favourite games of the year. However, with that being said, there are a few ways in which I think the game could be improved. Most of these ideas are simply suggestions about expanding the customisation options within the game.

• The ability to create minor civilisations. Seeing the same ones in every galaxy becomes somewhat tiresome.
• The ability to pre-set relationships between specific civilisations, so that each game involving those two factions will have them set at a certain relationship at the beginning.
• (For the mercenaries expansion) The ability to create mercenary ships that can be found at the Bazaar. I know that they have already mentioned that they may add this feature in the future, and I would love it.
• A star system customisation system including things such as choosing the number of planets within the system (limited at, say, five), class, name of the star, etc. This can be used to customise a custom faction's home star system, or any other star system which then may appear randomly within the game. If the player has the precursor worlds DLC, they could also add precursor planets (maxed at one per system). I could only see this being added in a DLC or expansion.
• A fleet style creator. As it currently stands, when you create a ship in the designer while playing as a faction with the Terran ship style, that design can be used by all of the factions with the Terran style, which I found pretty annoying, it made my cutsom civilisations feel less unique. The ability to add new fleet styles entirely would fix this problem. You would have to design the shipyards, stations, and one of every ship type (or just select ones from other ship styles) before that fleet style could actually be used in-game. I could see this being added in DLC rather than a free update.

• The ability to select ships in space battles via click-and-drag, and manually selecting a target for them. This small addition would go a long way to improving the frankly lackluster battles.
• Replace the United Planets with Coalition Treaties, that could be researched by any faction. Basically, this type of treaty would allow you to create inter-civilisation coalitions similar to the U.P, wherein legislation is proposed and voted for or against which affects every civilisation within the coalition. If the chairman at any given time has 50% approval or higher, they can move for complete assimilation; all civilisations within the coalition vote to decide whether to give all of their stuff to the chairman's civlisation. Minor civilisations will generally vote in favour of this, whereas the major ones would tend to vote against. I always thought it was a little strange that the U.P would pop up out of nowhere, and this change would rectify that.