Unless I missed something you can't request (or demand) resources from the AI. If they can ask you why can't you ask them?

You also can't hand over control of ships or planets to allies (whether AI or human) - at least as far as I can tell. It would be great if players with races with abilities that complement each other could hand over control of ships to their allies so they could form balanced fleets under a single player's control rather than each player having to monitor the other player's battles all the time.

This would also be entertaining if you could always receive intelligence from your own ships whether or not you had "given them away" to keep an eye on what your ally was up to and if you could reclaim ownership of your ships at any point thus making it easy to suddenly undermine an ally.

PS what about a "suggestion" sub-forum to hold suggestion threads?