Been playing this latest series of GalCiv and these are some of my thoughts so far at 300 turns.
First, there is not enough ship miniaturization in this game, you can only have 3 components and you can't have more than 1 thruster on a ship, like it is some precursor special or something.
The ships to me were one of my favorite things to design and customize and see perform in battle on an actual battle screen with different angles, now that is gone and makes this game rather boring, every race has the same things and abilities, there is no traits or abilities that can make my ships better than the everybody else, they are essentially the exact same with a different design and colour/color.
Not seeing the tech tree is a major issue here, it slows everything down, guessing at what will get me to a medium hull design, if it even exists. I use to research miniaturization over extra attack and extra defense, it seemed the AI never researched miniaturization so I would instead.
Resources, it seems a struggle when your a synthetic like the Yor, Promethion seems near impossible to find in this latest series and as the Yor you can't expand very quickly or at all unless you search half the galaxy first and by then all the bio's have got huge populations. The Yor/Synthetics have no need for all those food improvement techs, it is a waste for them, how about improving mining of crucial ore's for population growth, like starting out with the ability to do 0.15 extraction at least over the other races. They no longer have an approval advantage over the other races. I don't see the Borg complaining about crowding or pollution or working to hard lol.
Economy, it seems a little to limiting, again to build a synthetic population you need to build a starbase and a lot of them to grow and everytime I build 1 or 2 I go broke right away, not enough income to really get things moving here.
Galciv 4 seems promising but I think I will be playing the earlier versions still for bit and go back and forth. I still am trying to get use to this latest version also.