[Sandstig]

Good post Tampa_Gamer, but there are three points you mentioned which I think may need some clarification.

1) Diplomacy/Intelligence - "The AI currently does not treat any techs as strategically important and will trade all of them away the same turn they are finished. This quickly forces games into a race of who can meet the highest number of races quicker so that you can get that many more trades for each tech you put on the market."
- I've had many experiences wherein even allied races wouldn't trade me some of their weapon technologies when I'd offer them a lot of my own weapon techs and some cash to go with it so this could have a lot to do with the difficulty setting used and your own diplomacy skills.

2) Ship Design / Building - "(2) they need to insert a "filter" command so you can view either only the jewelry or the real components in the component list -which can get quite long. I have also encountered some crashes and freeze-ups while using this portion of the game, so I think they have some work to do here."
- Actually, you can select the option to only display specific types of components. If you select weapons, for example, there's an option to only show either Beam, Missile or Projectile weapons. In the Jewelry screen, you can select either jewelry specific to your shipset, generic jewelry, or jewelry used in the five other shipsets. I do agree that it would be nice if there were more options for filtering this though, perhaps being able to remove components from the list which no longer seem viable or which you don't use anyway.

3) Ground Combat - "That's it. No audio of your ground forces during the resolution phase (ala MOO III) and certainly no 2-D representation of your forces battling it out (ala MOO 2)."
- If by MOO2, you're referring to Masters of Orion 2: Battle at Antares, then I would really have to disagree with you on this. In MOO2, whenever you invaded a planet, you'd get a screen showing your troops and your opponents troop just going at each other. That's exactly what you get in Galactic Civilizations 2 as well, except in GalCiv2, you get something like a slot machine for the odds that your troops will defeat your opponent's troops.