I've been playing some games on gigantic, all abundant maps. More often then not I've attempted to zoom out, to get an overview of the galaxy, only to realize I was already zoomed out. Basically I need another zoom mode. In that mode we would no longer care about stars, planets or such, we would play on a sector basis with a group of sectors forming clusters. You'd send huge fleets around directly from sector to sector.

I hope most of you have heard of the upcoming game Spore yet, in which you start with a single cell and evolve towards more complex life. Spore plays on different levels. First you're a single cell, you evolve and end up as some animal crawling around. Evolve some more and you enter tribal stage where you have to bring your tribe to success. Once you achieved that, you enter the civilization stage (do I have to explain this? ) and in the end you enter space to seed your lifeforms on other planets.

So what would that mean for a 4X game like Galciv? Basically you could pick up where Spore ends. You start out in your home system as some corporation, religious leader, politician or whatever with a single planet, moon base or even just a single base. From there you need to conquer your solar system.
Once that's done, bring along a first contact situation and let the game zoom out in a nice cutscene to the local neighborhood or start systems. Basically this stage would play like GC2 on a small or tiny map with somewhat rare stars/planets. And you conquer them all.
Enter next stage. Ships gone missing in the outer edges of the known space, strange rumors and fear spreading among your population until some day an invasion force or a foreign empire knocks on your door. Zoom out. Think medium sized maps past the initial rush.
Zoom out again. In the next stage you're a mega empire controlling a quadrant of your galaxy. But you're not alone, a few other empires are lurking on the far side of the galaxy.
Next stage: Zoom out, time to conquer other galaxies
Next stage: Galactic clusters
Next stage: Parallel universes
Next stage: Invading the Q continuum


Basically such a game would solve the micromanagement nightmare most 4X, including GC2, suffer from in the late game.