More begining game options, and a running scoreboard screen.

maby a button u can press and a graph come us and it updates like every min also maby u could just have options on how much resources you start with and how much of each type and maby u could have how many planets u start with like if you wanted to play the story out the tec has like 30 or so advent 1 but give them a big fleet and the vasari like 10 and a small fleet or something like that also like on Supreme commander maby have a mod button and all your mods are in that drop down list like 2x extractor speed 2x population cap mines neaver run out ext..... also whith dat score board maby the total power of your ships cos the tec would always have the most ship so in turn have the hghest scor but thier ships are no where near as good as vasari the tec just use overwhelming numbers and industry to poon down thier foe maby work it out using prices or something or total att power dont know u suggest something. but there is one problem they may use starting resources and planets to help balance the game but we dont know intill we have all 3 races. hint   

I think you can do most of the configuring you want by editing a certain text file, but I do agree it would be more user friendly to have a way to configure it in the game. And I would also like to see a scoreboard like you've described.

Jperzio...punctuation is a useful tool.

lol cant be arsed its only a forum its not dat important

wouldn't that kind of valuable information be something you should use spying for? you could extend that maybe to techs available, income, buildings, ships, population, anything you could think of.

another thing to add would be: choose what capital ship you start with .

Yeah, I often feel that information comes a little too easily in those 4x games. It would be nice to have a spy ship or simply just a slider to allocate funds to spying in order to attain that type of information.

Might build up slow, so you could only see how many planets they have, how much money they make trading and how much culture they project. Only after spending time/money could you see their fleet size and strength, research level etc.

Might make more sense and wouldn't take more of the player's time since it's just a silder in a menu.

reminds of how spying was done in vanilla galciv 2. I would favour it as it is not too complicated to take away too much of the players attention but add another layer.

this might also be something to distinguish races. say, the avent due to the lore would be good spies, tec possibly mediocre (think of corporate spying, not a new concept to a trader society) and vassari due to their alien origin would have more difficulty in this.

Yeah, that's where I got the idea from. The graphs and data that was shown after a few turns in GalCiv2 could be the result of us investing money in the espionage section of our empires. So slowly those various information tabs such as "Military" "Research" "Trade" "Relations to Other Empires" etc, could only then be unlocked for us to see.

Seems like a fire-and-forget method of adding another layer like Shadowhal said.