Had made these suggestions on the Galciv III wishlist but this is probably more appropriate so am copying the same here

Would just like to add a couple of reasonably small UI requirements to the large number of suggestions that have already been made which may help with some of the micro management stuff that cannot be avoided.

1. Shipyard - it would be nice to have a facility to manage the sponsoring planet sliders from within the shipyard screen. Today if shipyards have been shut down and planets assigned to something else (birthing subsidy, research, whatever), you have to go to the shipyard screen, resume and then go back to each sponsoring planet and manage the production sliders. You then often have to go back and forth between shipyard and planet if you want to say produce some ship in a set number of turns. Adding a facility to manage the sponsoring planet sliders from within the shipyard screen will help reduce micro management.

Conversely from the plant screen you should be able to see which shipyard is being sponsored. It gets to be very painful in extremely large maps to deal with the shipyard management issue.

2. On the minimap it would be wonderful if shipyards, planets and rally points are shown in different colours Also it would be great if selected items (including ships) are highlighted in some manner in the minimap to help locate the ship. One has to keep zooming in to find the item but its painful to do this if you have hundreds of items.

3. Rally points - when ships reach rally points it would nice if its treated as though its reached a planet or starbase and shown as 'stationed'. Today it will show as 'idle' and then you have go and set it to guard or sentry or whatever. Every click reduced is less micro management.

4. Sensors and FOW - if there are overlapping areas of vision then the boundaries of sensors are not demarcated. For regular ships this is not an issue. However if you build specialised sensor ships (and I think everyone does) with large range of vision it takes a lot of micro management to position ships to cover areas of your choice, Again this is a problem of very large maps. It would be nice if the sensor range has a dotted boundary visible so that again micro management becomes simpler.

5. Building upgrades - I think suggestions have already been made to allow upgraded buildings to be directly selected instead of having to go step by step. For example basic factory has a minor upgrade and then manufacturing centre and the  industrial sector and so on. One may not want to auto upgrade all then way but may be go up to manufacturing sector. It would be nice to be able to select just that for a tile - the production units can the sum of all the earlier ones (30+, 45+, 67, 101 whatever). This would also help reduce micro management.

my personal favorite micromanagement peeves:

* we have a dubiously useful "explore" command for ships, but no "scout stars" that goes out lighting up stars for planets.  if we did, players (and the ai) could just spam some scouts & send them out.  if possible, there should be some checking to make sure n+1 scouting ships don't try scouting the same stars & wasting their individual contributions

* in galciv2 we had the buttons to repeatedly move a selected build queue item up/down  quickly.  The drag & drop is nice/intuitive & all I guess... but research new factories while your labs/econ/whatever tiles on a specialized planet are upgrading in queue and prepare to sigh as you drag the factory  upgrades up to the top one or two spots at a time, click the up arrow, drag, repeat, repeat.  either a way to explode that lit out so we can quickly rearrange it, or some buttons to bump a selected item up/down with rapid clickclickclick.

* constructor>starbase spam has been noted already.  sending out a constructor with multiple constructor modules loses all but one when you construct a starbase, so you still need to send out spam after you've built them even if you have enough miniaturization.

* I know it's a different sort of micromanagemen, but I'm terrified the tech trees will be updated in a way that requires me to go back and repeat modding of each individual techcost in all ten techdefs files..  pleasepleaseplease give us something like this in techagedefs.xml:

<TechAge>
<InternalName>AgeOfWar</InternalName>
<DisplayName>AGE_OF_WAR</DisplayName>
<!-- Must unlock 12 techs to get to age of war-->
<RequiredTechPoints>12</RequiredTechPoints>
<TechCostMod>
<BonusType>Multiplier</Bonustype>
<Value>1.75</Value>
</TechCostMod>
</TechAge>

the applies to everything tech speed dropdown is too coarse to meet the more fine grained needs larger map sizes need just for baseline balance, the existence of Naselus' IAB mod & my ILO mod both aimed at mere baseline pacing for differing layouts (abundant <> occasional/common) on insane map sizes shows that nicely.  If there was a quick way to apply these sorts of things globally, these types of mods would  be drop-in compatible with things like custom races with new tech trees.  While I'm sure Naselus' mod would have other globally modded things if he could he went a very different way to address a very different problem & I can't think of an easy way to apply such things.

I would like to see the following things.

1. Better improvement queueing. I would like to be able to set the queue so that it would complete all of a certain type of improvement or group of improvements before moving on to he next item on the list. For example, if I want all of the manufacturing improvements built first before the research improvements, the queue will keep my manufacturing improvements on top of the list until all improvements and their upgrades are completely built as far as I have researched. Alternatively, if I want just one improvement to be built to its max level that I have researched before moving on to the next item on the list, I should be able to do so.

2. I would also like a ship patrol option. In late game on higher difficulties, it is common for factions to have toward a thousand ships. Even if they are all in fleets of five, imagine having to click on all 200 fleets to destroy them manually.

3. I would like to be able to queue improvements for star bases as well once their specialization have been chosen, and when I select "Request Constructor," a constructor that I have set ahead of time would automatically be queued to build at the nearest shipyard and move to the star base.

4. I would LOVE to have an option to relocate improvements. Instead of completely demolishing one and then rebuilding it from scratch elsewhere, it should be possible to relocate them to a different tile after a certain number of turns.

They won't use any of it. They will make another crappy pointless DLC or a patch that fixes nothing i mean come on how many months has the game been out and the sub menu for ships on the ui still just has all. How helpful is that? It just shows that they meant to put more options which lets be honest is hardly going to difficult to code but instead they release some crappy events dlc and patch a load of other rubbish, i'm not hopeful at all and i'd very much like to be proven wrong. How about surrenders? can we fix those? submenus? nah lets have more crap DLC.

Basically the suggestions get itemized and prioritized.  1.3's feature set was made specifically because late game micro and general UI unhappiness was the most common complaint.

This graphic largely explains it:

The options aren't 'get item for free' or 'get item for $5'. It's 'Get item for $5' or 'no items, just the base game in whatever state it's in when the cash runs out and we have to move on to the next thing'. Huge chunks of content usually have to be cut out of ANY game prior to release if it's going to be on time, on budget and on quality. DLC allows those things to be put back in, when otherwise they'd be lost forever (consider, for example, the roughly 10 hours of gameplay that was dropped from Fallout 2 - large chunks of which still exist in the game but are so sub-par that they had to be ditched).

The industry itself is largely guilty for this disconnect - it encourages players to get emotionally (and, with Kickstarter and indygogo, financially) involved with game development without really making much effort to educate them about how it actually works. While I know Brad's talked about this, and the guys at Paradox have explained it a few times, most software houses don't; in fact, many outright ban development teams from talking to the press or even on forums etc except in extremely controlled circumstances. This wasn't so bad previously, when they made a game and then they sold it to us. Now, however, with crowdfunding causing backers to presume they have a stake in the game, and the DLC model making even post-release players feel somewhat involved in the ongoing development, you get what's been labelled 'gamer entitlement' - the idea that the dev team should keep working until the game has reached the standard you want it to be at, regardless of the fact that people still need to eat and rent needs to be paid. 

You really should take your act to the steam forums where you will find an audience. As has been stated folks need to eat, pay rent and keep the lights on. In the end DLC are very good for the game industry. Your complaints would get more attention if they were not constructed as an attack on the publisher. 

Your opinion on the quality of DLC is entirely yours. I think the two we got are awesome. In the end just don't buy it and move on to the next game you can complain about. 

Having 101 colonies is sort of like having 101 spouses.  Think about that!

Maybe not quite as bad, but the management starts getting intense.  

1) Sorts. All of the lists in the game need improved sorting capabilities. See the list sorting capabilities of GC2 and start there. Sort planets, ships, starbases, etc. by name, type, class, size, distance from selected ship or planet, population, population capability (i.e., how much food), production, morale, top item in production queue, etc. Distance and non-ownership is of particular importance in "goto" lists.

2) Filters. Discovered planets by ownership or non-ownership and sortable as in 1), including distance from selected planet or ship (esp. any ship with colonization module). And, come to think of it, resources as well - both claimed and unclaimed - and sortable, including distances from any selected ship with a constructor module.

3) Sorts.

4) Filters.

5) Better correlation of faction colors between the diplomacy screen and the main map and mini-map "area of influence" color scheme.