I hope the new gameplay is going to be more than just endless progressbars with "OK" buttons at their end (see e.g. archeological digs, space megastructures).
Yeah the dig sites take soooo long and require you to waste a whole manned sci ship for half the researcher’s lifetime instead of having them multitask like the Heads of Research already can with surveying. And please make planet scanning A LOT quicker so we’re not forced to play tall and have a bunch of wars if spawn is filled with 3-star systems with really-hard anomalies and there’s a bunch of neighbors around. I have a mod where some planets can have research stations built on them to farm infinite Ancient Relic resources, so there’s no need for dig sites except for roleplay and the precursor event chain. It’s really neat, and also has some interesting worldbuilding added for humans and a bunch of settings you can choose at the start. And more early-game situation log quests.
And PLEASE make AIs also limited by influence, only being able to annex one system every 16 months while the AIs can go on these massive and constant land-grabs and then do jack shit with 85% of the habitable worlds therein while half of the remaining 15% instantly get slave revolts they do bupkis to fight back against is really annoying especially since there’s so much going on all the time.