Personally, I LIKE lots of things to build & research. I didn't mind the tons of building & management in MOO2 & Civ. However, if there were a tool that would allow you to build a certain item on selected planets, all planets, etc, then this would be greatly simplified. But, overall, the more stuff, the better
I also thought that Civ's research tree, with each new discovery attributable to two or more previous discoveries, was much more fun than SEIV's research tree, and made your research strategy more difficult to plan out (and, of course, essentially, puzzle solving is what we're doing here...right?).
I also wish that their strategic combat system was a little less difficult to use...one thing that bugs me is having to click on the mini-map just to re-center the big map somewhere else...the ship's auto-pathing is poor also...
By the way...I am working on a complete research tree document and will publish it here when I'm done. It'll be in PowerPoint because I'm not an artist, I'm a computer geek

Any artists out there can feel welcome to take the finished product and put it into some nice graphical form
Paul E. Mason
Senior VMS Systems Admistrator