Hi, I have some suggestions and observations that may be useful or may prompt cleverer people than me to point out how what I suggest is already happening, if I only knew.
1. Auto-trade. Instead of trying to keep track of which colonies have trade routes to which alien faction, let the game pick a route that is close and not duplicated. It doesn't need to be optimum, but it could allow the player to choose not to trade with certain factions (or if the relationship is worse that a certain level, drop it from the list of possible destinations).
--- also --- I think would be helpful to have a notification (in the box upper left of screen perhaps) that a trade route has been completed and how many trade routes are remain open.
These are important for trade centric players like me. I generally mangage to get a couple hundred credits worth of trade going, which helps diplomacy as well as economics.
2. auto-mine The game suggests (by an optional button for a give constructor) open targets by the mineral and lets the player choose. Could include all possible starbase activated nodes. Course there is the problem of exactly where to build it, but that seems like a problem that could be solved.
3. (just a comment) On occasion, the right hand listing of other faction reports "failed to generate" for a given faction. Don't know what is going on there. Version 1.9. I have seen this in most of my games at some point or other.
4. When I fight "heavily defended" nodes I would like a clearer reporting of the anomaly result. Even if I am checking every turn I seem to miss this fairly often. I know the rewards are very good, so I would like to see it. Maybe a list of notifications for previous turns? Not sure.
5. When I upgrade a ship the display shows what I could add but not what the ship already has. Would be useful. (added) As Das Tactic has mentioned, a complete summary of your faction, perhaps as another tab from the Data button, would be helpful. Many times I have wanted to see this.
Summary comment: the game is coming along great, but a little extra polish wouldn't hurt!