First of all, let's focus on one of the most glaring issues I have when it comes to war: The Ground Combat. There are a few great Mods who add Events and Variety. But my primary problem lies with how the list for Armies just becomes a bloated mess, even in Vanilla, ones you have more than 10+ races in your Empire. If you use Mods to enhance the available Army-Variety, this problem is even further increased. So in my opinion, this system should be overhauled to something like this:

Instead of having a unique Army for each race available in a list, you should have something like the Ship Builder Screen.
There you can choose what races inside your empire are Part of which Army Type.
In the Base Game, this could be quite Basic and the Generated Armies could amount to something like Mixed Armies, where every type of race in your empire is simply added to a pool, all of which are considered for your basic Assault Army.

This, of course, creates the need to specialize what kind of armies you actually want and pick out the kind of races you actually want to be part of your army.

You could have Slave Armies, Cannon Fodder Armies filled to the brink with all the Pops who are quite weak but breed like hell, Specialized Armies with specially augmented Pops entirely used for Warfare, the list goes on.

This would allow Mods to further enhance these systems to the liking of each player and it would cut out the bloat you currently have in your Army Recruitment Screen.

What also would add a level of immersion, is if you would have a small screen where you can see how your soldiers look. This would be a bit advanced of course, but nevertheless, it would be a nice touch.



Right now, Planets feel "empty". The really small window in which you see how your planet develops and the otherwise quite numerous menus makes it a bit hard for me to feel "immersed" in this game. I've tried countless Mods to topple that, Bigger Planet View, WP's Planet Variety, countless Building Mods but the core issue remains the same. There is no need to look at any kind of visual feedback besides the Icons in the menu themselves. And I personally thought that the old planetary system at least felt like there was something more going on than just a small Window with a City texture expanding, numbers changing and squares filling with colours.

How about instead of the same City texture simply expanding, you have a larger window actually showing the surface of the planet, where you can see the individual Building icons be spread out on like on a Map? How about the little Icons you get for your Pops are visually represented in this Screen as well?
How about the Job Window and the Building Window are combined into one, where you can now just click onto a building and see the amount of Pop Groups filling what amount of Jobs there?
How about megastructures on planet are a thing, visually speaking? And I dont mean rings, I mean skyscrapers that actually popout of the planets surface (Ok, this one might be a bit much, but it could still be cool).
I think this would greatly enhance immersion. And you could even reuse all the assets already in the game. Even Districts could be represented this way. Of course, you would have to have the same buildings in the same spots to, for example, actually make it possible to still find everything (similar to Heroes of Might&Magic III).

I think if you change the visual system from the ground up, maybe combine the building and the District System into one unique system it could greatly benefit finding a middle ground between visual fidelity and depth while building up your planets. So far, the system seems overly one-sided.