Personally I will not stop playing, however I am a causal gamer with maybe ten hours a month anyway. However, I have to admit that the bad ergonomics causing cklickfest bugs me too.
I don't mind micromanagement personally. In fact I would not play the game if they took this away. At least allow the option.
Of course micromanagement should be an option - but so should be macromanagement! People are not demanding that control is took away from them, they demand a way to control without clicking around for hours.
At heart, GalCiv is designed for tiny and small maps. If you have more than 20 of anything, you start to have to click and click and click. There need to be tools that reduce clicks, but not control.
If i might quote myself:
The ergonomics are in parts quite bad - the lists don't really help to keep things organized, because there is no sorting, no grouping, no searching. The ship, starbase and planets list are basically useless when you have more than 10 of something.
Better ergonomics would help to keep track of things and be more efficient in gaming. Consider that I don't get payed to play the game, I play the game to relax. I come back from work and load up a game that I last played a month or more ago and I only got about 2 hours! Therefore I need tools that help me to quickly get back into my empire (where are which ships, what planet does what ...). Also I enjoy managing my empire and making decisions, not clicking around! So please try to minimize the clicks and focus on giving the player control.
https://forums.galciv3.com/466716/page/1/#3558766
I don't understand what the problem is with having more convenient ways to control your empire. What is wrong with having a one click/short cut to put all ships in a tile in to fleets? What is wrong with a grid where i can filter for certain criteria and then apply one command to many ships with one click? Like: Filter for ships called "Fighter Mark 3" - select all - decomission.
And no, I'm not demanding "Play my game"-buttons! I demand the reduction of clicks! If the player will go ahead and give the command to a number of ships anyway, than give the player a shortcut for that please - or but a game mechanic in to prevent that.
Let me give an example: In Open TTD you manage a transportation company. That means you have to manage a large number of trains, airplanes, ships, trucks and other vehicles. The vehicles need maintenance, they need upgrades and commands what to do. You are able to micromanage every single vehicle, but there are also tools to macromanage. You can group the vehicles in lists and manage the list instead. For example you can order that every vehicle in the list will upgrade to a certain type if there is enough money available. So you spend like 10 clicks and over time a 1000 vehicles are upgraded - and if something goes wrong, for example the upgrade fails because of money issues, you get a nice litte message.
What is wrong with that? Why aren't there such tools in Gal Civ? Why can't I group my ships to a list and order that every turn x% of my money should be used to upgrade as many ships in that list as possible? No, it does not take away control from the player, because I'm still the one who decides what is done an when it is done. At any time I can intervene an micromanage if I want. But it does eliminate a huge amount of useless clicks.
Same goes for planets. In Gal Civ 2 if I wanted to use my money to buy buildings, I had to it one building at a time. Now the planet overview helped, because it offered a list you could go through, but it still was a clickfest. Why couldn't I mark a number of planets - for example by drawing a rectangle with the mouse or filter for buildings - and then buy like 20 buildings with one click? The result is the same: I bought 20 buildings. But the ergonomics are different.
