You want to play a space exploration/resourcing/strategy game. You find, amongst other things, IC. Unlike most other browser based games of this type, IC has a couple inherent advantages. There are not 47 types of buildings, 200 types of ships, 120 different resources. It's just barely complex, just enough so to allow for fluid strategy and the potential for innovative approaches, rather than requiring complex scripts and a spreadsheet to maintain. The UI is easy to understand and fairly intuitive. The learning curve is such that you can learn as you play without having to bury your face in a strategy guide for 3 hours to understand what you are doing. This most assuredly gets people in the door, provided they find it.

IMO what absolutely slaughters that group of people on day 1 and causes 90% of them to leave or not bother even starting is the beginning of the round, or even the beginning of an empire, is the painfully slow start. Assuming you get in at the beginning of a round, you build what you're going to build... and then you wait for 6-12 hours before you can even explore, then another day to explore again. Then portals. Jesus christ, portals take forever.  In the meantime there is nothing to do but a few scant minutes of building. Boring. If you come in after the beginning, you still face the same problems, but also you are lost in a flurry of activity, have no chance to explore if you come too late, and a hard time getting involved in the broader family aspect of the game. It's just you and your 6-12 hour build times, the fleet you might scrap together from handouts from your family which is most likely inactive, and a galaxy that is already for the most part conquered. That's going to drive a ton of people away.

Face it, this isn't 2003 anymore. The marketplace for free games has changed, and there is some pretty entertaining stuff out there that is far more captivating and entertaining than waiting 4 hours for a tick to do a thing that will take you 30 seconds before you wait for another tick. IC needs to compete, because the people out there looking specifically for a space exploration/resourcing/strategy game would probably rather play a free action RPG than watching the clock waiting for mines to build.

I would suggest, to increase new player appeal: 

Starting with more planets, and more resources to build with.
Drastically reducing build times for non-laser buildings and explos.
Reduce travel times for explos.
Create a special unit for the sole purpose of being used to transfer planets willingly, which also moves at the new "non combat" speed, and has a very short build time.

and the most important ones:

Leave travel time and build time for combat units the same.
A much larger galaxy which is more dense with systems, less dense with families.
A limit to travel distances to reflect the limits of technology, or at least an exponential increase in times/costs for long distance travel.

Why? It gives people more to do, more often, without exacerbating the player base reducing problem of farming. It makes the game less hostile to new players, without in any way making the process slower for people who thrive on attacking. It could further reduce the farming problem by making it so some families are so distant that setting up and portaling near them just to farm them is impractical due to cost and time restraints. Small families no longer have to worry about EVERY big family and EVERY active attacker. Small and medium scale conflict becomes localized, And large scale /long distance conflict only occurs between large, active, powerful families that are evenly matched. The #2 family isn't going to set up to attack a medium or small family across the galaxy because it costs more time and money than it is worth. If you want prey to flourish (the prey being new people), you have to reduce the number of natural predators. Obviously we can't kill the predators off, but we can put some nice high fences up to slow them down. These changes create an opportunity for players to create, manage and flourish right from the get go, without having to watch what they have created be taken away over and over again by enemies they cannot possibly defend against.