This is a great game and the governors do help relieve some of the micromanagement pain that’s inevitable in a complex game like this, but I do think there are a few simple things that could be done to further improve on the current set of governors.
1). The colony governors are a great idea but sometimes they simply don’t work.
I play on gigantic maps with abundant everything. When I invade a late game AI opponent I often need to have 150 to 200 transports on hand before I invade. I generally have 75 or so planets producing transports. I set all of my planets to have the same rally point. Invariably, out of a typical 15 transports produced in a turn, one transport will simply forget its rally point. I generally don’t notice it at first, but at some point I see a transport that’s been launched just sitting next to the planet that produced it. I check the transport and it has no destination set, I check the planet that produced it and see that it has its rally point set. So I set the rally point destination on the transport and away it goes. As it is now, I have scan around the map every other turn or so checking for these laggards and giving them a goose. This causes a lot of effort that pretty much defeats the benefit of having the governor in the first place. Unreliable functionality is not much better than no functionality at all.
2). Setting up two different rally points is tedious.
I often want to set up different rally points for different sections of my empire. It’s easy to set the first. Just set all planets to the rally point that will be used by the most planets. But setting the second one can only be done by clicking on each planet and changing its rally point individually. It would be so easy if you could simply use the mouse to select an area of planets on the main map or on the mini map or on the map in the governors screen (most preferable) and change the rally point for the entire selected group of planets at the same time.
3). Rally points can’t be changed on a ship class basis.
By that I mean it would be nice if you could direct all transports to one rally point, all constructors to another, and, all military ships to a third. That way you wouldn’t have to sort through them and separate them after they arrive, particularly if you want to use the auto fleet option.
4). There are no global planetary governors.
Sometimes I want to disable the auto upgrade function for a period of time on all my planets (there could be a few hundred of them). I might want to do this because I know I’m going to research the factory branch up to Industrial Sectors and I might not want each and every planet to start upgrading factory to enhanced factory, then enhanced factory to manufacturing center, and then finally, manufacturing center to industrial sector. It would be much more efficient to disable auto upgrade, research to Industrial Sector then enable auto upgrade and then have your planets upgrade from factory to industrial sector. As it is, I have to disable auto upgrade individually on each planet and then perform the research. I can’t even then go back and individually re-enable each planets auto upgrade because it doesn’t work for some reason. What I do have to do is go into each planet individually and schedule each upgrade that I want to occur, i.e. if there are four factories on the planet I have to upgrade each of the four to industrial sector one at a time. Multiply this by a few hundred planets and you can see what a pain this is. A single global enable and disable of auto upgrade would be so much simpler.
