In GC2, it was an option you could enable.

If you hit "pass," you can end your turn without issuing orders. If you set the fleet on "guard," they will not pop up in the task queue at all until you take them off guard or they are attacked. If you put them on "Sentry" (I think that is the name), they will not show up in your task queue until a non-friendly ship enters their sensor range.

Also, I believe you can sort the ship list by "movement," which should give you the ships that still have movement points left. I think...

Ok, that makes sense. A skip-to-next-turn feature would help you a lot, as would a modification of the sentry function (call it "reserve" or something like that).

As for forgetting where your units are: I have this problem too. The only solution I have found is to establish depot areas close to potential adversaries where keep your inactive ships. When a war starts, you deploy from the depot. It is NOT a perfect solution, especially since it leaves swaths of your border without immediate protection, increases response time vs. invasions, and may not work as well on some size maps or with some strategies. I always play the largest maps, where defending your whole border at once is impossible anyway, and ships need to be fast already, so it suits my play style.

As far as sentry is concerned.... honestly, its almost as if neutral ships actively seek out your units on sentry just to annoy the player!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

There is no reason for this crap, its an obvious thing, even a 20 year old game like Alpha Centauri can manage to understand having an option to only activate sentry units when they spot enemy, not neutral.

No excuse.

I think when you hit "turn." the first thing it does is finish out your ships' movement. That is why you will get colonization notifications and anomaly reports after you hit next turn.

I wholeheartedly agree, not helping the player take advantage of all of their movement options is a disservice to the player on the part of the interface.

I find that I MUST micro-manage some of my ships because of the inability of the game to manage ship movement at least as well as GC1 and GC2 did. Two ship modes are of particular concern: 1) Ships in the "auto-pilot" mode; 2) Survey ships auto-surveying anomalies. When ships in auto-pilot mode complete their journey, any movement points left get discarded. When survey ships in auto-survey mode survey an anomaly any movement points are discarded AND the ship continues its auto-surveying in the next point. Hence a survey ship with 26 movement points will take more than one turn to survey several anomalies that could be surveyed in a single turn.

BTW, I reported this problem during EA and was told it would be corrected by release. I guess I should have been more pro-active about getting this problem solved.

If I recall correctly, during the alpha and/or beta they had a two stage end turn.  You moved your ships, tended to your planets, etc, and then hit end turn for stage one.  All ships on auto pilot then moved, and if any finished their movement and had moves left over, you then had stage two, where you moved them and hit end turn again.  (Note: Sorcerer King still has this same mechanism).

Again, if I recall correctly, there were many complaints (not from me) about how confusing this was, and it was removed and the present single stage end turn implemented.

Publius of NV -- You remember correctly. That was a carry-over from GC1 and GC2. It is also a rather common way of handling the problem. BTW, I like that way better than what we have now.