The empire screen is just a list of planets by order of conquest, with no way to arrange or mark them in any way. It's just memorization right now, which means you have to keep leaving the dropdown to confirm that yes, this is the planet you meant to build at. If you lose and recapture a planet, it even goes to the bottom of the order, further making it hard to remember which is which.
We need to be able to rearrange planets so we can keep track of things, and ideally even create labels and groups (ie "front line", "production", "research", etc.). Otherwise the empire dropdown just becomes a shortcut to zoom in on the planet and not a place to manage things.
Also star bases should be in this panel, arranged the same way the planets are (just move the subpanel over from fleet, but have the order and labels match what you did for planets). Right now they are off by themselves in a subpanel in fleet, in build order, and you can't tell which goes with what planet without leaving the dropdowns.