Gilmoy, did you initially just build the 3 factories and Solar plant by themselves THEN the Research center and finally the TC all in linear order?

Basically, yes.  I build roughly:

• growth: Colonial Hospital (and promptly upgrade to XMC if I have it)
• manuf: For a world that needs "large" build capacity (e.g it has 1+ nigh-complete hex rings; or it's adjacent to an AI), I go for a triangle or line of manuf, with Solar in the middle.
• as needed: Farm(s) next to the Hospital.  Approval to let me stay on the rim of the wheel (at +50% bonus tier).

Then I start building the world's specialization.  N.B. all of my large planets look oddly similar until this step

• pass 1: tier 1 Research Laboratories to fill 1 ring, in triangle order (first finish 1 triangle, then go cw or ccw around the center hex).  My manuf is usually enough to complete 1 tile per turn + excess to its specialty, e.g. to research (so filling in the center hex with a "sacrificial" tier 1 is worthwhile for the extra adjacency bonuses x duration of build-up).  Maybe upgrade the outer ring to tier 2 (in 5 more turns).
• pass 2: Destroy the center hex and build the major improvement thereat.  This usually takes several turns x 100% manuf axis.  I prefer to finish the build ASAP, rather than splitting some pop to use the remaining specialty tiles in their "crippled" empty-center-hex state.
• Proof sketch: envision rectangles on a 2D time axis, where x = t and y = +% bonus.  Then area ~= total output.  Extend rightward to the 300+ turns it takes to win.  How wide do you want that short rectangle to stretch before you get to the fun tall rectangle?  For constant game duration, you maximize area by minimizing the short rectangle's width.

It takes some good fortune to have 2 land masses that are just right for this, e.g. a small island of 3-5 and a huge island with the ring + more.

For small planets with sufficient non-tile +manuf% (techs, starbase, planet), I skip the Solar triangle and go straight for the pop/specialty.  These usually don't have a nigh-ring anyways, so they're not candidates for your precious Wonder-class improvement.

More 0.41.2 game-play experiences.

4.  Gameplay: Micromanaging really, really, really, really sucks

~25 hours(!!), Turn 124.  Each turn takes 20-35 minutes now.  (The save file actually says "34.5 hours", but some of that was me AFK without hibernating the laptop.)

OTOH, my economy has already surpassed 2 Godlike AI (Drengin, Iridium), and I'm within 2% of the 3rd (Altarian).  And that's without any major combats.  Maybe 12 ships have died in the whole galaxy so far.  They don't have the range to get to me, and all I build is slow weenies (but with range).  So whatever they're doing ... be no match for my micromanagement skillz.

5.  Gameplay: Lower build costs, higher upkeep costs

From Alpha 0.31, the economy was tweaked to make things easier to build, but costlier to maintain.  That's a step in the right direction. It makes wealth slightly more relevant (from afterthought to annoyance).  But I expect all numbers to get further rebalanced (i.e. changed), so I won't nitpick, except in broad terms.

• It's still too easy.  Set aside 1 world in 10 as a moneyball, and it'll pay for everything.  Also, research Xeno Tourism and your tourism income alone will overcome almost any amount of maintainance.
• It's still not enough.  Wealth is unique in that it accumulates across turns.  But it (currently) doesn't buy you any game-breaking (e.g. game-winning) advantages, in the way research does.  Obviously, diplomacy et al. will change this.
• If there is some "storefront" of benefits that you can only purchase with bc, and cannot obtain in any other way, then wealth generation for store buys suddenly becomes analogous to research in a tech tree.  (Galactic auctions for small Precursor relics, maybe?)

6.  Gameplay: Approval moneyworld asymmetry

Approval makes us tweak.  But it seems weird that the way you tweak your Approval higher is by stockpiling a benefit that you want to do anyways.  After some experience, I confirmed my initial impression that this is ... overloaded: it conflates two benefits, which causes synergy.

• Specialist worlds become asymmetric.  Forgeworlds and techworlds may need to tweak wealth-ward, but bankworlds don't, because they already maximize in that direction.  Hence, a bankworld's default state is to have maximal Approval, for zero opportunity cost: they do exactly what they would have done regardless.  That introduces an asymmetry in the way we handle worlds.  (For a micromanager, it means banks are oases: You never need to tweak a bankworld.  They're maximally happy, and there is no queue.)
• The real-world parallel might be: an entity (government or corporation) gives a tax cut / kickback / bonus / other bribe to make its citizens happier.  But the 0.41.2 implementation is that you save it all, i.e. the underlying premise is that saving makes us happy.  That's true for me, but not for most of my peers!  The more common societal effect is that spending a bonus makes us happy.
• To make it truly symmetric, add a rule such as: "bc spent for Approval are not saved"; they're simply lost.  Then all 3 axes would be symmetric ... if that's even a design goal.  But this would probably be ugly in proliferation of game elements, e.g. distinguishing between "bc of savings" and "bc of approval".

7.  Technological Capital Gambit addendum: 17 techs in 30 turns

From my scrap paper, here are the turn numbers in which I completed these techs.

• T076 Terran has completed the Techological Capital.
• T078 12.G3 Wealthy Population
• T080 13.G4 Xeno Entertainment
• T084 14.G4 Xeno Economics
• T087 15.C5 CO/Optimized Manufacturing (but I wuz robbed -- can't upgrade to Interstellar Collectors until C6)
• T089 16.C4 Environmental Engineering
• a pause here while most of my planets build a Soil Enhancement
• T094 17.C5 Research Coordination (robbed again, same bait-and-switch until C8)
• I fear having wondrous manuf, and no combat ships worth building ... so the Small Ship Stack:
• T095 18.W2 Weapon Systems
• T096 19.W2 Defense Systems
• T098 20.E2 Orbital Manufacturing
• T100 21.E2 Interstellar Travel
• This takes me into Age of War, by a few rps.  N.B. Ages are strictly based on total rps spent: 3000 per Age.
• T101 22.E3 IS/Hyperdrive Specialization
• T102 23.E3 IS/Sensor Amplification
• T103 24.E3 IS/Advanced Recirculation
• T106 25.G5 Xeno Tourism
• T109 26.G5 Interstellar Banking
• T111 27.C5 Practical Fusion
• T115 28.C6 Precision Manufacturing (now I can also build the C5 Interstellar Collectors)
• T118 29.C5 Environmental Research (bug: has no effect?  None of my research improvements show the +1 level.)  
• T121 30.C6 Terraforming
• Iridium dang near invades me with one naked speed-7 transport!!  I design, build, and shoot it down.  Whew!
• T122 31.M2 Militarization
• T123 32.M3 MS/Enhanced Training
• T124 33.M4 Planetary Invasion

And I actually have too many manuf worlds and not enough techworlds.  In fact, of my first 12 colonies, and not counting the Technological Capital world itself, I had only 1 other techworld + 1/2 of Earth.  2.5 techworlds is not enough; I should have made 4-6.  So I think this is actually slow progress from an imperfect start, and could be sped up.

8.  Gameplay: Small ship stack and miner swarm

My small ships are just that: Small (50 capacity), with the +1 speed, +1 sensor, and +2 range.  Since I'm way more aggressive than all 3 AIs combined, I have to go to them.  I replace all redundant weapons and defenses with Life Support for moderately long range.  I prefer Cannon for now (as you can see from above, I've never researched a weapon tech, like ever), and a Chaff vs. the AI's fixation on missiles.  So my ships are minimal 0-0-3/0-7-0 with sensors, or 0-0-3/0-14-0 with a 2nd Chaff, and range 30 (= 34 for Terran).  That's still not enough to penetrate into enemy backfields.

• Workaround 1: Research the Medium Ship Stack, with capacity 75 and tier 3 components.  Nag nag, I'm getting to it.
• Workaround 2: Miner swarm.  Find a resource (e.g. Durantium) between me and AI.  Send fast constructor (+ fleet of weenies) to it, and preferably 5 hexes beyond it.  Create a starbase.  Follow up with double-constructors.  Specialize to Mining Ring, and take the defensive modules.
• The 1st constructor must have sufficient range.  Thereafter, follow with a stream of (at least 2) double-constructors with no range (default range 11).
• All of your ships can exist and move beyond your range, with no penalty.  You just can't issue a movement order to them in any out-of-range hex.  You can freely order them to move from one friendly ZOC to another ZOC, no matter how far the gap between them.  The only risk is that you lose some control over them while they're "in between" ZOCs: you can't creep them 1 hex at a time (so they can just walk right up to an enemy snub fighter), and your evasion is limited to full-move straight-line paths back to any ZOC you can click in.

I need to mine resources anyways.  So this tactic lets me use a single starbase for the mining role and the range-extension role.  One good mining starbase lets my Small Ship fleets swarm over enemy space.

• I really hope the AI will know how to do this to us!  It requires a bit of a paradigm shift to think halfway to the goal.
• Godlike AI does not (yet) counter this human tactic ...

9.  Gameplay: Large galaxy just barely not large enough

I need 13 colonies to get to Ideology tier 3 and take my point-generating tile improvement.  Well ... I hit 11 colonies, and then Iridium outraced me to 2 of them in my backfield.  Now I'm hemmed in by all 3 AIs.  If this galaxy is a bridge hand, then I'm West.

There may not exist another 2 empty colonizable planets!!  Grumble.  But there's hope, I found unsurveyed artifacts along Altarian's border.  You know what that means!

• Technology, shift to C8 Integrated Research
• move Survey Ship
• engineer's head explodes
• Technology, shift back to E4 Life Support

No way I'm wasting an Artifact on something I can finish in one turn myself ...

Wow.

More 0.41.2 gameplay comments.  I will try to steer my comments to what I call a gameflow level.  That is, I'll take a tour through my actual in-turn play-by-play methodology, and note whatever sticks out as being ... not smooth.  Generally, anything that forces me to pause and drill will interrupt my trail-of-thought, and become a gameflow obstacle.  These lean toward repetitive player tasks, and whether the UI  handles them well.

I will skip most "typo-class bugs" and placeholders, as outlined above.

This is the same 0.41.2 "Bene Darda" game as in my original post (with the Technological Capital gambit), which I started on the day of 0.41.2 release.  I'm up to ~50 hours(!!), turn 143.  I micromanage every queue, every turn.  I'm winning, limited only by the slow speed of sending transports across a Large map.

B1.  Move all ships

I'm West.  Drengin is South, Iridium is North, Altarian must be East.  I think there are no more empty colonizable planets anywhere.

• Ships sidebar is too tedious. I almost never use the Ships list to find a ship.
• Flat list in chronological order.  Surely it's a placeholder, so I won't gripe further.
• [UI-request] Group tabs by "theater" (player-defined, oh please).  A theater is whatever logical grouping I want.  Mostly, it would be a subset of ships + fleets in one map area, whose gameplay decisions must be planned holistically.  It could also include ships that are far away on the map, but with same player intent, e.g. en route.
• I prefer to zoom way out, so that my eye can sweep.
• Even with ~50 ships, I have had no real trouble keeping track of them all.  Dunno if that scales up to 200+ ... maybe my head explodes
• Let abstract mode denote the zoomed-out icons, and rendered mode denote zoomed-in detail.
• For each ship/fleet, click it on map, and move it.  I go roughly ccw around the rim of the Large map, from Drengin (sw) to Iridium (nw).
• Abstract mode UI is insufficient to inform me as I sweep my gaze.  This forces me to drill, which is like the gap from Excel to Concentration/Jeopardy.
• [UI] In abstract mode, currently selected ship/fleet needs a highlight.
• [UI-request] In both modes, show ship/fleet status icons.
• if idle, show hopping ball icon (or other attention-demanding).  I want to sweep my eye and see what needs my attention.
• if upgrading, show hourglass?
• [UI-addendum] These could be player-selected overlays.  Example: I choose a palette of "HP bar && troops bar && idle", bind it to hotkey Ctrl-7, and whenever I type that, it toggles my palette of ship/fleet icons on/off.  Then I can tailor a bunch of palettes to the info I want to selectively view.
• Region-based views.  Sometimes I want essentially a database query, which is way beyond a click-to-drill UI.
• In conquering-horde mode, I often wonder: what ships do I have coming here?  That could be decomposed into a couple of idioms.
• [UI-request] Define a region as a 1st-class query, e.g. drag to mark a circle.  This is potentially overloaded, which may require a shift key or hotkey to disambiguate.
• Multiple select.  It selects all friendly ships/fleets in that region.
• Region define.  In this mode, it simply defines a floating circle, which persists as a UI element (until the next command?).
• [UI-request] Comefrom.  Right-click(?) on a region, and choose a query such as: show all inbound ship paths that end within this region.  Then I would use this frequently around Iridium planets I've bypassed, to verify that I have enough transports en route.  Other obvious commands could include: show all outbound, ...
• For a game in which distances in hexes is so important, it's tedious to have to manually count hexes in space.  Elegant UI would make this elegant.
• [UI-request] Tape measure. Click once to anchor.  Thereafter, a ruler overlay follows your mouse around, with a floating distance display.  Wave it over the map, and it shows you the straight-line distance in hexes.  Click a shift key (maybe literally hold down Shift) and it plots an actual ship path (i.e. avoiding impassable hexes, taking shortcuts), and shows you the distance.
• [UI-request] Circular region.  Click once to center the circle.  Thereafter, dragging illuminates a circle of that radius.  This merges with the region-define UI mentioned above.  It lets you envision starbase effects before you actually get there, without having to count hexes.

B3.  Govern all planets

For each planet, I check its build progress.

• New planets (colonized or conquered) impose light cognitive load, because most turns they don't complete anything.  Glance and skip.
• I always disable auto-upgrade for every planet, and do it manually.

[UI] Govern global option.

• I rarely assign many tiles in advance.
• Double-click to place a tile is good.  The "Build" button is also good.
• [UI-whimsy] Temporal "script" that can act on tiles not existing yet.  To truly automate a complex tile build-up, we must have a way to specify "action-in-the-future", i.e. targeting tiles or improvements that do not yet exist (because they haven't been built yet).  A sample script will illustrate:
• @A, build, Colonial Hospital
• @B, build, Basic Factory
• @C, build, Basic Factory
• @A, upgrade, Colonial Hospital to Xeno Medical Facility
• @D, build, Soil Enhancement
• @D, build, Solar Power Plant
• @E, destroy, Slave Pit
• @E, build, Xeno Farm
• @D, upgrade, Fusion Power Plant
• This may be outside the scope of GC3's design.  I've never seen a 4X include a temporal action language.  So the first one to ship would be a 5X ...
• [UI-request] Maybe replace the Build button with an Insert button, which lets you insert a build request into an existing list.  Or Reorder up/down to edit a list.  Currently, we must delete everything in the list, then start over, which is maximally clumsy.  (Guess which competitor's 4X I've played ...)

For each planet that can-complete a queue this turn, I optimize its queues.  (Remember that I'm an off-the-deep-end micromanager.)

• A planet's 3 queues include:
• social: its own manuf queue.  This is always 1-to-1.
• military: its shipyard queue.  Complication: This is N-to-1 in the general case, where N is the number of co-sponsors.
• technology.  This is M-to-1, where M is all planets in your empire.
• Lossy queues will become carry-1.  All queues in 0.41.2 are maximally lossy: all excess production is discarded.  This is already slated to change; rejoice!!
• In the 08/22(?) stream, Paul mentioned that social and military queues shall become "carry-1", i.e. all excess production will carry over, up to the build cost of the next queue item, but without ever finishing two in 1 turn.  So any production beyond the 2nd item's build cost will still be discarded(?).  But this means that most of us, most of the time(?), will no longer have to micromanage fractions of 1 item's cost.
• [UI-request] 2-item Technology queue, plz
• [Exploit?] This suggests that we can Rush the current queue item, and still keep building toward the next item.

This one feature probably moots most of my per-planet tedium.  (N.B. moot, v. to render moot   tenses mooted, mooting, will moot    #wordcrime)

B4.  Govern all shipyard-planet cliques

N-to-1 queues (shipyards and tech) still exceed a click-to-drill UI.  Clicking/hovering is inherently 1-at-a-time.  The canonical 0.41.2 gameflow problem (for me) is: given lossy queues, and that my M-to-1 tech contributors may intersect some or all of my N-to-1 shipyards ... how do I conveniently optimize all of those queues concurrently?  Work-around: I scamper like a mouse to do a database join, run Excel on my 2nd monitor with some macros to compute the roundoff breakpoints, and do pixel click-hell on every queue.  Yah, it sucks.

• [UI-request] Planet includes shipyard link.  Fit it somewhere.  It should show which shipyard, and what the spending is.
• In the planet title bar, next to the "<" and ">" buttons, add a "^" button for the shipyard, which takes you directly to the Shipyard list.  If this planet has no shipyard, gray it out.
• [UI-request] Shipyard/Tech shows all contributors.  Just as Shipyard has a hover with all sponsors and their contribution, let Technology have a hover with all active contributors.
• Or: Customized Planets list views.  In Alpha 0.31, the Planets list showed each planet's mp, rp, and (net) bc, which let me sweep my gaze without drilling.  In Beta 0.40 (and 0.41.2), it now shows bc, pop, approval.  So we've lost a gaze-sweeping way to see all rp contributions to Tech.
• [UI-whimsy] M-to-N production control.  Dunno what this interface should even look like.  Maybe it has to embed a complete graph renderer, and show you a clique at a time (which could engulf everything if all of your cliques also produce tech).  Each node of the graph would be a mini-wheel(!! -- heh).  The key might be to auto-calculate the minimal contributions to exactly-finish a local queue, and split each producer's mini-wheel into 2 abstract chunks: (a) earmarked to complete X, and ( b ) excess.  The user's control would be something like rearrange excess chunks.  For example:
  
• A clique of 3 are each building locally (social), jointly feeding 1 shipyard (military), and all produce tech.
• Their clique pies earmark exactly enough to complete each one's social build.  These portions are grayed out, and can't be selected.
• The shipyard's remaining build is a partially-filled pitcher.  I click the pitcher, then click excess portions from its sponsors, which fills up the pitcher, and earmarks each planet's excess with a pitcher icon.
• If the shipyard's pitcher overflows while I still have planets left, that planet's excess is fragmented into an earmarked portion and a new excess.
• Finally, Technology sits as a huge pitcher (bucket? swimming pool?).  Double-click that to earmark all remaining excess to it.
• If the Technology bucket fills up, all remaining excess is truly excess.  Click a moneybags icon to set all excess to wealth.
• N.B. earmarking to a queue automatically sets pop in the planet's wheel to exactly achieve that much along whichever axis is relevant: manuf for social & military queues, research for tech, wealth for moneybags.

Finally, around mid-way through the Age of Expansion, I start to juggle multiple shipyards.  By this, I mean the trick of having a cluster of 3+ planets share 3+ shipyards, and switch madly to 1-2 per turn to exactly meet remaining production or exploit proximity.  Shipyard sponsor management could really use some drag-and-drop UI.

• [UI-request] Drag-and-drop shipyard sponsorships (literal).  Make a sponsorship arc be a 1st-class UI primitive, with 2 anchors.  Click an anchor to attach or detach it to/from a shipyard/planet.  Then we can change our sponsorships entirely from the map, without entering Shipyard or Add Sponsor.
• [UI-request] Ibid (abstract).  The above UI idiom isn't pretty when you want a far planet to "hold a leash", e.g. at distances of 20+ hexes.  Also allow an abstract drag :
• [UI-request] between the Planets list and a shipyard on the map;
• [UI-request] between a planet on the map and a shipyard in the Starbases list;
• [UI-whimsy] directly between the Planets list and Starbases list.  (and show both lists at the same time, hehe)

B5.  Turn, Reload, add 0.1, Turn

I hate it even worse when the UI lies to my face.

• [Bug] Social/military/tech queue says "1 turn to complete", but next turn it is not completed.
• Work-around: Save, Turn, check all queues to see which ones lied to me.  Reload, add 0.1.
• Repeat again and again and again, as needed.