Regarding to no Faster Than Light travel and communications, I think that It could be added as an option in a checkbox manner, like in Aurora you can start a game without Trans-newtonian technology, this way you can have a completely different experience playing the game.
Another interesting point with that is how can you wage war with no FLT, or how can you maintain an empire. I think you face the same problems that the Spaniards and English had with their colonial empires, when travel and communications took months to reach the different provinces of their colonial empires. But again, I think that should be just an option for the more hardcore players.
Regarding the different areas for planets, I'd like to add that these different areas have different colonization costs, for example, it's not the same to live in Antartida or in the middle of the Sahara Desert, than to live in the Mediterranean coast, though the atmosphere of the Earth is the same everywhere the latitude and terrain composition matters a lot, regarding habitability issues. So I'd make temperature a funtion not only of the albedo, but also of the latitude, and let's not forget that unless the atmosphere is very thick, like Venus or Titan, the albedo depends on diffuse reflectivity of the terrain. For example water reflects less than a 10% of the light, like forests, sand or soil reflect between a 20 and a 30% and snow reflects between 40 and an 80% depending if it's fresh or not [1]. That means that different areas would have different temperatures, and by modifying these areas by building stuff in them the albedo would also be modified. Asphalt only reflects about a 4% of the light [2].
To end this post, I would like to comment also that I agree with Antagonist about civilian industry, I think that civilian industry should be directly proportional to population and infrastructure[2], and their main function to create wealth buy producing consumer products that also would increase the happiness of the population, then you should be able to control part of this industry, depending on the policies, political system, species, etc. In a similar way that games like the Hearts of Iron or the Victoria series model it. This industry would consume by default a certain amount of resources, like raw materials, energy or food, and maybe little amounts of trans-newtonian materials too, and would produce consumer goods, that would increase maintain happiness and wealth, through taxes to the industry. This way you don't have to build Financial Centers. Also it won't be civilian or military industry, just industry, and you as a government can ask the civilians to lend you a certain amount of that industry to produce spaceships and the like, like in real life, the trade-of is that, by using the industry to produce spaceships or other stuff, you loose the capacity to produce consumer goods and wealth, so you have to balance that.
The advantage of doing this is that you don't have to micromanage to much the industry tab and that besides the trans-newtonian materials, wealth, population and fuel, you only add 4 more resources: consumer goods, energy, raw materials and food.
If you think that you need more resources then you can divide the generic consumer goods in pharmaceuticals, luxury products, furs, machinery, etc.
[1] hxxp: en. wikipedia. org/wiki/Albedo
[2] Of course that depends in the end in how realistic you want the game and the amount of time you don't mind to wait while the turn takes place.
[3] I think that infrastructure should be used also to model the transport and communications systems of the planets, for building colonies in difficult environments I'd use something else, like life support systems, or something like that.
