I was thinking of some more options to further differentiate planets from one another, bc on the long run it does seem to become repetitive to settle the 'almost' same planets over and over again.

* special resources as seen in rise of nations. as such, they are not used to buy anything per se, but give boni to various aspect, like extra income for some resources, increased research speed or build time and what not. nothing huge, but just a little bit.

* I'd like some change to the exploration system as it is now. the ideas, the features that can be researched are great, but I dont much like the 'chance' element. or rather, keep the 'chance' element if you want, but include something which is not random, whose effect you can judge, but what you need to invest in to profit from it.

* maybe there could be a second parameter to designate planets, like atmospheres, axial inclination, distance from sun or whatever. that way, planets could be "desert, oxygen atmposhere" "ice, hyrogen atmosphere". of course, one might argue that certain types of planet conditions produce certain atmospheres, but ... well, there is potential.

I'm aware of mods which give more planet types and like to play them once updated. but they still have effectively no variation within planet types. do they?