After progressing a bit further in the game, I have started compiling a list of game improvement suggestions. Here's what I have so far.

1) Add an ingame notepad to keep general notes to yourself on. I currently keep notes as I play with pencil and paper, which seems kind of low tech.

2) Add ability to make a reminder note to yourself to be delivered as part of the empire report on a future turn. These should have a distinctive color.

3) Class M planets seem a little too good. I suggest that instead of always having all non-deritium resources they only have titanium and deuterium. Players would then have to colonize more exotic planets to get the higher tech resources. Some tweaking of the other planet types might be needed to make sure no resource is excessively rare. Empire homeworlds might be an exception, retaining the current 5 resources.

4) The choice to give the player 3 colony ships but no other type at start seems a bit odd. As I recall, BotF gave me two colony ships and a scout which seems more rational. Note that I have only played the Rotharians on the default difficulty. Having no scouts at start almost forces you to do some initial exploration with colony ships until you can build a scout ship, which can cause you to lose those initially valuable ships if they run into a dangerous anomoly. A neat feature would be to add the ability for the player to select the ships he starts with, perhaps adjusting his starting credits and titanium based on his choice.

5) For the love of God, please make all ships capable of cloaking automatically cloak when launched. It is extremely annoying to lose a cloak capable ship because you forgot to tell it to cloak. No officer so monumentally stupid as to forget to turn on his cloaking device should be allowed to command any starship, the empire's leader shouldn't have to tell every ship to turn it on.

1+2: what kind of notes are you doing - I played many times...well...at first I perhaps also made notes, later I didn't. Overviews in EMPIRE are enough...ok, sometimes look through system, whether all important buildings have energy, and always think to diplomacy

3: Class M is ok in my opinion, otherwise it would take much more work to handle resources.

4: Each race has its own number/kinds of start ships and you can change it easily by editing \Data\Ships\Startship.data

5: automatically cloaking - I think it won't come (or come soon). SirP wrote in the german forum, that cloaking is easy and easy to do from gamers.
Gamers can cloak, if they want, and enemies have no disadvantage by automatic cloaking

1) Mostly I make notes regarding strategic planning of what I want to eventually do with each system. One system will eventually become a distribution center for each resource, some edge systems need higher priority for building defenses, some will focus on shipbuilding while others on research, and so on. Once my empire expands beyond 3-4 systems I find it difficult to keep that information in my head.

2) I would like to be able to put future reminders in empire reports mostly so I don't have to be checking every system every turn to optimize production by buying things the system does not have the industry to build quickly. For instance, suppose I order a sytem to build an expensive upgrade of its industry buildings from tech 3 to tech 4 types. Say the upgrade would take 20 turns with the systems own resources, I want to speed that up. But I don't have quite enough credits to buy the whole upgrade. So I would like to make a note to myself to go back in a few turns when I expect to have the money for the upgrade. That way I don't have to risk forgetting my plan to expedite the upgrade if i just watch the empire reports every turn.

3) Well, we have a difference of opinion. I just hate "win button" features in games where one member of a class is so drastically superior to all other possible members.

3b) I did a little google research and couldn't resist editing this. It seems the notion of iridium availability on Earthlike planets is at odds with real world science. Iridium is the fourth least common element in Earth's crust, meaning something like 90 other elements are more common. On average, meteoroids have been found to have an average abundance of iridium about 500 times greater than that in earth's crust, strongly suggesting that iridium would be much easier to mine elsewhere than earth, the only class M planet we have data for. I can't do similar analysis for duranium and crystals, since they can't really be associated with a real world substances. Ok, I realize its a niggling point, but things like this annoy me. I like science fiction games to portray real science whenever possible.

4) Ok, I may try that.

5) I don't get why there is so much resistance to this. BotF had exactly the same issue, and it was just as annoying then. The point is, unless something has changed since BotF, there is NO situation when you would EVER want a ship to not have its cloaking device on. There really shouldn't even be an option for the ship to not be cloaked in the first place. I have a hard time seeing why I have to do that completely pointless mouse clicking on every single combat ship I build in the Rotharian fleet. How can this be so freaking hard to change? Surely there is a flag somewhere in the ship's data structure that tells the ship wether the cloak is on or off by default, all you have to do is change that one flag, it should take less time to code than typing out a forum post explaining why you don't want to do it.

5) bombardment is one situation where you need to uncloak. But still it's a rather rare occasion and default should be auto-on (which I also suggested to SirP some time ago). Well, code is online and can be changed by everyone. I would also be in favor of this change.