In VB6, civilians tend to build mining colonies on their own. While nice, I would like to have more control over, where they are allowed to do that. The game I guess has several parameters as to what would be ideal for the civis to build such a base. Maybe making these available and editable might be enough control. If not, the ideal is always body-individual rights-setting
If the issue is that the mines are popping up in poor places, economically soaking, I think reworking the system for determining where they open is a better solution, though I'd like to see an economic overhaul in general.
6. Several times now I attempted to create a merchant powers, small nations which relied on trade income to function. I failed every time. The coming changes to trade will help a lot, but the main issue is that shipping lines always build colony ships - even when there is nothing to colonise (small nation don't do much of it after all). Which means their income is spent on useless ships, making it much more difficult for them to grow (they can even fail completely) and creating less taxes. As such I'd love to see an option to prevent shipping lines from building a specific type of ship, so that they would build only what's profitable.
With the economy as simplistic as it is, I don't think you'll manage to do much even with such a change.
I think the game would benefit significantly from a more robust economic model, including things such as tracking the wealth/prosperities of individual colonies, tracking TN minerals sent to the civilian economy as a trade good, requiring shipping lines to purchase TN minerals fur ships, requiring the civilian economy to expend TN minerals to create civilian mining complexes, more robust AI to handle this kind of thing. Any kind of economy overhaul would require a serious amount of work, however, and at this point I wouldn't want to see it delay the initial release of C#.