To add some more constructive thought, I was initially against the idea of splitting manufacturing and ship building. I thought it was a needless complication of Gal Civ 2.
But I do like the centralized starbase idea. I agree that allowing you to combine planets to a single starbase can help reduce monotony. It can also allow for very expense ships without requiring aeons to build. Overall I think its a great idea.
Agreed. The problem with these games is when the micro management gets out of hand when your empire gets too big, it just turns it into a total drag going through each world or city to change their building settings individually.
Master Overview Tool
Here is my idea again more flushed out. Basically its a Master Overview of your empire, and you can choose to use this option for then it gets too big to manage in the normal mode of the game.
At the top you have a map of your empire, where you can select which of your planets will fall under which build policy you want to put them. In this case Policy A and B. The pentagon controls the percentage of planets telling them what they will build, depending on what policy they fall under. Then you could also set up rally points in this tool too, to send the completed units when they have finished being built.
You can have as many policies as you like and each one can have a different shape depending on how many build options you give it.
Its just an idea anyway 
Now I must get back to work on my own job 
