Soooo having played a bit with Intrigue, looked at the files, and such, I have a few thoughts I wanted to share.

Firstly, I'm loving the overall gist. It's a worthy compliment to a already great (if at times convoluted) game.

Alright:

1) Early Events, Events, and Crisis. These are great! So glad they came into the game. Honestly I think GC could really expand creatively if we had easy to use editors to create our own events/early events/crisis/colonial events/galactic events and could distribute on Steam.

2) Commonwealths. They need tweaking, but they are fun. I'm not certain that they should exist in terms of foreign diplomacy. I think other races should simply not recognize them separately, so that they don't drag me into wars. They should be handled more like a independently managed province than a separate but dependent EMPIRE if you get my drift. Great feature, needs some cleaning up, but I'm impressed with how you plugged it into the game.

3) Governments. Love em. I have but two gripes. A) While others want the planet limits to scale to the galaxy, I'll just say that I find the intial government limit of 4 a little too arbitrary. 5 at least makes for one fully deployed shipyard and is a naturally cooler number lol. The other gripe, is that choosing certain governments gives you ideology points. I really don't like that, and I really don't like ideology in GC as a whole, so its not surprise. "Imperial" governments being "Evil"... ok... Sure. There are a lot of fun governments but they don't all really make sense, and there isn't a sort of natural progression. Its at least not sorted well on the page.

I think a more interesting approach would be to have chains of governments, and you can freely "evolve" into the next stage without waiting the 26 turns, whilst switching from one lane to the next requires the wait time and comes with a temporary influence penalty. Its kind of silly that my people can convert from diehard interstellar republicans to some sort of hippy commune or imperial monarchy without skipping a beat.

So something like: Colonial Republic < Interstellar Republic < Galactic Republic OR Etc. (you could have branching options here and there).

VS another chain of imperialism that has a rational militarist chain or a monarchist chain, etc.

4) Diplomacy. I don't think governments affect diplomacy, beyond that they give diplomatic penalties and bonuses. Too bad. Interstellar Republics should just naturally dislike Monarchists. Regardless of the good/evil dichotomy (which will also have an effect and either mitigate or exacerbate the issue). Some governments have penalties... to EVERYONE. I'm not certain that should be the case... they should be penalties to MOST OTHER governments, but they should generally get along with similar minded governments. I'm reminded of how Austria Hungary, Germany, and Russia were buddy-buddy for a long time as "kindred imperial authorities" and looked down on those "perfidious" governments of France and Britain.

To bad Germany fired Bismark lol.

ANYWHO

5) Both relieved and disappointed that the new unique ships are not custom ships per-race... but I totally get it

Loving the game! Thanks SD.