I'm sure most of this has been mentioned but:

1. A 'Launch all button' for each planet and one for the whole empire

2. Fix the star and planets so they look realistic. That is, get rid of green/purple stars, have some binaries, make the Red stars huge and have no habitable planets, and white/blue stars very small, with 'cold' looking planets.
Also make it so that all habitable planets look habitible. As one guy said, I have seen systems with '0' 'planets' that look like earth and 10, 12 etc planets that look like barren rocks.

3. Make it so you know you are at war and who with (icons on their ships)

4. When you get a GNN report and click 'Go To' the planet in question should be removed from the list when you press done.

5. Have some indication of tech worth (in beakers) to help with trading.

6. Make it so that if I give laser III, for example, to a race that has only laser I beforehand, they can't research laser IV until they get laser II. That is, don't allow the CPU to just jump each other miles up a tech tree without doing any work. On the same vein allow a 'no tech trade' option.

7. Make it so that it is easy to see a planet's max pop.

1. I would like to have a "Move" button beside the turn button to let all the ships on auto destination move before I do semething else or press turn. In GC1 I often missed opportunities because I could not react properly on ships exploring anomalies, finding stuff etc, because the ships did not move before I pressed "Turn". e.g. when you findd a 25% on tech and thus completed a research. I did not have the opportunity to choose the next thing I research and thus loose one turn. Or I would like to move all my explorers before I deside where my colony ships should go.

2. A button in the trade screen to autofill a deal with money or influence. This would avoid a lot of micormanagement for me.

3. Show the current costs of a tech in the tech screen and not only the weeks to complete.

4. Show the costs of the improvements on the planet screen and not only the weeks to complete on the planetary screen.

. A button in the trade screen to autofill a deal with money or influence. This would avoid a lot of micormanagement for me.

100% agree!

. Show the current costs of a tech in the tech screen and not only the weeks to complete.

Also a good idea imho.

Trivial nit, but should be trivial to fix. In "End Game Summary", the scores are ordered:
Society Technology Econ Military Overall
but the buttons are ordered:
Overall Summary Technology Military Economy Social Timeline

synchronize the words (social v. society) and the order (at least soc, tech, econ, and mil). It's a bit disconcerting to want to see a subcategory and it's in an odd spot.

8. Make it possible to zoom out even further to make it possible to view the complete map, i.e. something like the tactical view in GC1. For hughe/gigantic maps the minimap view is not sufficient to get a good picture of the complete galaxy and on the main map you can only view a very small fraction. At least on my small 1600x1200 screen Maybe not a "less than an hour" thing but I still hope it coul make it in 1.1.

I would also like to have the arrow keys to scroll the map...
I would like to have the custom music thing working as well

another thing i would like to see is the result screen of a battle - when NOT using "Full battle" mode

How about possibly adding an attack function that when I click on the enemy's ship my fighter will auto-course until it intercepts adapting to the changing course of the enemy vessel rather than go dumbly to the initial rally point even after the opponent has long flown-the-coup, so to speak. That is of course, so long as the enemy ship stays within sensor range of my attacking fighter.

Also, and not that it's a big deal, but whenever I go to click a spot on the mini map in its lower right hand corner near the TURN button, it's too easy to unintentionally select the next turn rather than the mini map location. I think the TURN button's border sensitivity is too wide an area, which causes this inadvertant mistake. Like I said, no big deal really, but just thought I would mention it.

Thanks

About to start my first game. Am looking at the initial page you see after loading up the game.
I can see that each of the choices (New game, Tutorials) etc, take you to a page that normally has a Back button on it - the location of, and the resulting effect of, clicking this button varies and bugs me a bit.
In some screens it has a standard click sound. In another it has no sound at all (annoying). In the options screen, it's location is replaced by the Quit button (the last button you want us to click!) and is moved over to the right. That Quit button shouldn't even be there - it's not standard interface logic to bury a quit button on it's own in an options screen, just make an optional 'reload game with new video/audio settings' appear when the user clicks back (if a change was made).
I'm mentioning it now, because if I'm finding this inconsistancy now, it's probably dotted around in the game. The interface always needs to have audio cues and consistant layout - when it's missing, it really stands out.

A few more points:

1. Your website is quite slow - clearly you are gaining a huge number of customers. Please can you factor in the costs to upgrade your webserver/bandwidth to accomodate this extra interest.

2. I'm seeing a 'lot' of typos, both in the game, and in the news items on this site - it even beats news.bbc.co.uk who excel at making them. Going forward, could you please proof-read all content either after adding to the website, or to the game itself. It doesn't take long, and avoids the reader coming to a jarring stop when reading.
On the Tutorials screen, one entry has an explanation text beginning "And" which should be "An", and also had another typo in the same sentence.

3. When creating a new game, I am finding the general interface to be unusually cumbsersone:
a) The dropdowns require that you keep the mouse cursor positioned precisely within the verical bar - if you stray either above, below or to either side of it, the dropdown loses focus and you're left holding down the mouse button with nothing happening; please change the dropdowns to maintain their focus for the entire duration that the mouse button is held down, regardless of where you drag the mouse - as long as a change in vertical position is detected, then scroll the slider up or down. Otherwise, if you increase the game resolution higher and higher it becomes painful to use them (I'm only using 1280x1024, and it's already frustrating).
When playing similar strategy games out there, I like to 'remember' what the original game settings were so I feel I'm playing against a 'standard' set of game settings, and maybe only slightly tweak them every few games. However, on the New Game screen, when you browse through the modifiers (density of planets, number of habitable planets etc), there is no way to return them to the original settings if you can't remember them, except to quit and reload the game. Even leaving that screen and then re-choosing New Game doesn't reset them to their initial values. Please add a reset button, or better still, mark the 'defaults' in some way.
c) A small point, but I'll mention it again for consistancy. The game 'modifiers' allow you to scroll left and right - these should all follow the same pattern, i.e left is used to decrease/minimise and right increases/maximises. However, some follow one rule and the others do the opposite - the button selections just need reordering.

Heres one: Change the square grid to a hexagonal grid.

This may not be easy, or it might be simple, depending on how deep in the engine this aspect is.

Why bother you ask?

On a square grid, you can move a ship diagonaly and travel further than if you move verticaly.

In addition to that, you could move diagonaly to the left and then back to the right " < " and travel to the same spot as if you had only gone verticle... except in reality it is easy to tell that you travelled about twice as far and exposed twice as much fog of warto your sensors.

A hexagonal grid is the perfect solution to this common strategy game isuue.

I would like to see a few changes to the interface also.

1. How about a cycle through ships button on the main screen.
2. I would like to see the current range of the ship displayed for a single turn. Not just the total range of the ship.

An "autolaunch ships" function would be quite wonderful.

Thanks.