so where to start.

I like the shipedidtor, even if there is a bug that prevents me from turning symetrie of, think it´s well done, maybe even a even bit too much.

Planet administration is ok, didn´t notice too much diffrence to the previus Title, but I didn´t play that for some time so maybe I am wrong here.

Leaders are quite random but thats just how it is, luckly you can put the less usefull once in the faction anf forget about them, else I think some events or mechanics that influence them in loyalty or even stats traits might be nice.

I really like the colony system since it makes use of reather unusefull planets and helps in the lategame withmicromanagment since not every planet you conquer needs to be a coreworld.

at this topic conquering is strange, you send 1 transporter up to any world and you just have to wait till you get it, means as long as you can defend the transporter you can conquer a whloe sector with just a few transporter and a bit of time, I guess resistens makes it longer but I never really noticed a more than 5 round of sige at most and 2 at least. also had a bug where my conquerd festrons where allys unhappy with me after i conquerd their last coreworld and had allways the -30 Happines form war with them, at this I would also like a pruge option for races that simply can´t co-exist with others like festron or hive drones, makes so sence to just let them live after a conquest.

Upgrading Starbases for combat ist utterly useless, the allys have just about 100hp, and poor stats even with lategame tech, and a ship with 200 prod cost can easly beat a base with say 5 urpgrades in military even if the costs are compareble.

What I would also like is some kind of summery what the pros and cons of the diffrent weapontyps are, as of right now I´m just using rockets since antimatter is the most abundent resource in std. options.

another thing I noticed in my first game, i really struggelt with since for a long time, till i got the tech to upgrade the relics and ascention crystals and I got all tech in a row after the 2 second one, so in just 4-5 turns my since output went from 20-30 to like 1600 in that time, and i could get every tech after that in a single turn.

so what I want to say is that you get a flat 1+ scince for every ascention Point on every coreworld, would be fine if it just stoped at that but no you get bonus for scince from every relic a well so, in my first run I had 36 Points and a bonus of over 300%  from my relics, this made every research distrikt or building and scince focused starbase obsolete since I can´t get more than 1 tech per round.

On the note of relics, 4 of them stand really out to me:

research relic it´s the weakest since all it does is give you a scince %, and than even the same as every other relic

control relic well I find some of the controll consuming stuff nice but found i don´t really use it a lot, and the +0,1 is very weak still better than the research one...

industry and approvel now these badboys are worth going to war for whereever you spot them.

my sugestion for the relics would be no scince % form all relics ecept the research ones, so they become more usefull and a scaling bonus to controll so it´s worthwhile to have.

For influence I´d say as of now it´s nearly pointless besides makring your territory, flipping is really slow even with a diplo with that traits thas makes it eayser, and well understandble the diplomacy malus makes a peacsfull takeover very unliekly.

for traderouts I would suggest less max routs but more % boni for them, cause lets be real who wants to send up to 50 frighters about to get the max out of them, but than again in the lategame everyone and their dogs, cats, grannys and whatever else the is will turn on you.

so my last point is diplomacy, it´s fine in the eraly and midgame, somtimes a bit annoying with the trade requests, but you get that in neraly everygame that hast techtrading, hence the option to dissable it.

in the lategame it´s a bit frustarting that even my ally turned on my after a approched victory conditions, so I understand that the AI gets a strong bias against the one who is winning but even the guys who have absolutly so chance of harming me got after me, even if I can crush them with just a single ship ( 2k production carrier and transporter with over 800 att and 1,2k hp) and I had 10 of these...

So what i´m saying is it makes no sense for a civ to got a war with someone so much more powerfull no matter how much they hate them, in reality they would most likely just submit.

 So all in all think it can be a nice game but as of right now the balancing is really wonky at best and many system feel only halfcooked and could be more.