Almost every point you bring up has been discussed in the streams. Nearly 2/3rds of your post has been beat to death either here or on the Steam forums, notably the idiocy of Tactical Combat, The Zig Zag issue, the Static Solar systems (three streams talked about this issue and why we cannot have 'moving systems'), Terra forming which is broken into techs by specific races. Any of course your dislike of the Tech Ages, which of course are just another way to gate you from bee lining specific techs, every game did it, Ages were done to help the AI rather than give you an advantage.

Oh I forgot, 3d space. No thanks, it cannot be done (effectively) and still be fun. Go back to SotS which has a HOST of other issues but does have some 3D.

Again nearly ALL of your post  have been beat to death over the last 6 months. Go look at the streams and search each topic and you can find your answers. There is a reason the game looks and feels the way it does. It is the direct predecessor to GC II, that formula worked and it worked well.

Not replying doesn't mean we aren't reading. But while we appreciate feedback, bear in mind that the game's core feature set is not going to be changing at this point.

There are a number of 4x games out there, and they're all different. Tactical combat, 3D maps, etc., are not 'modern' features; they just aren't intended features of the GalCiv series (of which this is actually the fifth game). 3D maps for instance were seen in other games at least as early as 1995, a year after the first GalCiv game.

Yeah, but my ideas are so good I need official recognition for them.

I understand the desire for better graphics, TC, 3D, and so on. I just don't care about those things. So I suppose I'm more of Stardock's target audience.

I address this here - https://forums.galciv3.com/457443/page/1/

Change is not always good, as a fine example look at MOO3:

MOO3 was a radical departure from MOO2 on paper it had lots of great and exciting ideas that sounded good on paper. Put when it came out it was awful not 10% as good as MOO2.

The it's a modern game therefore your space map must be 3D is a nonsense, 2D makes far more sense in turns of usability for this type of game.

As for tactical combat, turn based combat in MOO2 was fun but distinctly non-epic even if you had a fleet of death stars it didn't feel epic. I'd rather watch my ships in epic combat following tactics and fleet roles I assigned before hand than have turn based or real time tactical combat that didn't feel epic.

You obviously have strong opinions OP and want Stardock to reconsider designing the whole game around your preferences but the basic features are as they say set the star map is 2D and tactical turn based space combat is out. If  that turns you off the game it's too bad.

Don't get me wrong there are things I'd like to see changed that have been left alone like more visual engagaement with the race you are playing and more support for custom race visuals but they have made changes in many places ultimatley though it's obviously a descendent of GC2 but I don't see what is wrong with that.

Ascendency had 3D turn based combat, it was fun at first but got old since you had a few standard tactics you always used and again it lacked a sense of epic scale since only small numbers of ships where involved.

Imagine tactical combat with 60 ships per side of varying sizes. each turn could take an hour or more.

As for RTS style comabt in a turn based stratergy game it would be jarring and out of place.

The Stardock folk are pretty good about responding to constructive feedback.  This feedback is just not that constructive.  It is abundantly clear that they aren't going to add features which completely redefine what the game is at this point in the development.  It would take YEARS of development time to implement the stuff you want, which obviously isn't happening at this point.

Your main complaint is basically that the vision for GCIII doesn't match up with Stardock's vision for GCIII.  No offense, but thats something that you just have to let go.  You aren't ever going to talk a company into completely changing their vision for a game at this point in the dev cycle.  It can be worth providing constructive feedback about individual features that could potentially be changed, but you can't ask to have the whole game changed like that.  You may need to just move on to a different game that better matches your vision.

That is an inexact parallel. In a ship game each element is moving individually, while in Total War each entity although animated separately, follow a grouping. Where you can only have 20 groups total. Hence, what we have in that game is a game where you control 20 objects.

The other thing with Total War series is that it only really operates on 2D and not 3D. The terrain and models look 3D, but there is nothing flying overhead to take advantage of the Z space as it were. This can be done completely 2D and if you really like video games from the old days, I recommend you take a look at Sword of the Samurai from Micro Prose. You will see basically all of Shogun total war in that game modeled with terrain and everything in a 2D fashion.  All that total war did in that aspect was make the game pretty with 3D graphics. Mind you they did add much needed UI improvements along the way and have developed a great game beyond their predecessor, but it took awhile to get to that stage.

Check out the oxide engine and look at their preview of a space battle. That is what it would look like and what I want to see, but it is not going to work for Gal Civ 3, due to the pacing of the game. But maybe they will give us that kind of cinematic experience (albeit extremely low density on ships)

Have you played Gratutious space battles?
 

It's easy to call something outdated and leave it at that

it's much harder to point to another 4X game that gets it right. "today's standards" are half-assed games like civilization 5 that are more like a simulation of empire than a strategy game that is interesting to play for people who know what they're doing

you mention that other games have 'better ideas'.

how many of them are intuitive and easy for the player to start making informed strategic decisions? how many of them are accompanied by a UI and AI that can play the game well? how many of those ideas translate to a good multiplayer experience?

if those aren't happening, then the so-called strategy game doesn't actually have any strategy in it

even if they had the budget for modern visuals (they don't. no small 4X developer does), that's usually not what helps strategy games. it increases the clutter on the screen and takes away from the player's ability to solve problems and see what's going on.