1.
I kind of dislike the constructor spam caused by the fact that your constructor vanishes each time you are using it. Why not doing it the way Civ Beyond Earth is doing it with the explorers and their explorer modules? You build a constructor with one or more construction modules. You move your constructor, build your starbase or an upgrade and the module is lost BUT the constructor isn't. Now you move your constructor back to the shipyard where you can reload its construction module in exchange for money or just by waiting one or two rounds.
I am against this, because it will break the game. I give rise to the following abuse:
1) Buy a constructor;
2) Move the constructor and build the star base;
3) Move the constructor back to the shipyard, and wait (or pay). But because it does not take shipyard construction points you can either use the production on the sponsor planet(s) or build extra ships - military, colonizers or even more constructors;
4) Move the constructor back to the star base and upgrade;
5) Rinse repeat until the end of the game, resulting in star bases spam.
In other words: almost free star bases, and therefor even earlier and more boosts to the planets within the zone of control of said star bases.
At the moment building a constructor is a strategic decision: do i build a constructor, colonizer, military ship or nothing at all? By making the constructor modules gratis as far as manufacturing points are concerned it becomes a strategic non-issue - simply abuse it as much as possible.
Even if you would have to pay for the constructor modules this would not stop the abuse of it, because wealth is a non-localized resource. This means a planet on one side of your empire can generate the wealth and you can build star bases on the other side without spending manufacturing points - which are a localized resource. And i know you can already simply buy constructors, but that at least takes a production turn away from the shipyard.
By the way in real life/space (in non-surface-to-space-capable vessels) the navigation and propulsion system (not counting fuel) are around 1% of the mass of the vessels. For the game this would mean you send a constructor on its way and then you want to wait turns for the 1% that is not used in the construction of a star base to return to the shipyard?
While it is true that you would build less constructors it would increase the (micro) management of the constructors you actually do make, it opens the game up to serious abuse of it, and makes the strategic depth of the game at lot shallower.
