1) Payment based on distance in km, not transits

If you go through with this change, make sure that you make it so that transports will be weighted towards picking routes that make them a decent amount of income, instead of doing Earth <-> Moon runs for pennies on the dollar.

Being honest, I like the way the civilian lines work now and like the experience you are describing Steve because it makes the growth of the empire feel organic to me.

That said, could we add some kind of mechanic where if a civilian ship sits idle for too long the line decommissions the ship? In game it can be explained as a company doesn't want to pay for maintenance of a ship that isn't doing anything. So if you want to decrease the number of ships you just mark a bunch of colonies as stable and wait for the ships to disappear.

I was about to suggest exactly this one.

To implement an "autorefresh" function for open/background windows.  You can use browser extensions like "Auto Refresh Plus" for Chrome or "Tab Auto Refresh" for Firefox. 

Are you saying that these browser extensions can be used to refresh non-browser windows?

If I may, I'd like to make a different suggestion: the mechanical problem here is the result of a thematic oversight in that the ratio of colony ships to passenger liners is badly skewed from where it should be. I had to open up my last game and check the ship list to double-check - I'd been under the impression that passenger liners weren't being auto-built by civilians at all. Turns out they are... I have two shipping liners, and some 30+ civilian colony ships.

Now having lots of freighters isn't a big deal because, thematically, you should. That's the core of your economy. The majority of an empire's wealth coming from taxing the civilian economy is how you'd expect things to work. Moreover, if your government commandeers those ships you pay for it twice - first, paying them for the shipping contract, and second by missing out on the tax revenue they would've generated from their ordinary runs. Colony ships, on the other hand, don't have this trade-off. They spend their time happily shuttling colonists to and fro just as freighters move trade goods... and once the nascent colony is all filled up, they go idle.

It makes perfect sense for the government to invest in expensive slack capacity (for emergencies such as rapidly setting up a new colony to enforce a territorial claim or rapidly evacuating one due to hostile encroachment, etc.) but it certainly doesn't make sense for civilian companies to do so. The regular market for mass colonist transport just isn't big enough, in my games, to justify 30+ ships. Why this discrepancy?

Because the way colony ships operate - constantly shuttling people to and fro just as freighters shuttle goods to and fro to keep the interplanetary/interstellar economy humming - is a job that should mostly be done by passenger ships.

There will always be poor young whippersnappers looking to make their fortune in New America, and commercial colonist transport makes sense as the steerage-class passage option for them - from the shipping company's perspective as well, because while they can't pay much per cryogenic berth, if you've got 50,000 of them stacked like sardines you're making pretty good money on every trip. With that said, cryogenics are expensive and the government tends to play merry hell with immigration/emigration permissions to suit their own purposes, so the mass colonist transit industry is a bit boom-or-bust. This puts an upper limit on how many colony ships are economically viable for the economy as a whole to produce once you average out the feasts and famines.

Passenger liners, on the other hand, are ubiquitous. Just like air travel on old Earth, long-distance trips are still expensive, esp. when made on the regular, but they're still within reach of the average consumer and many, many people need to travel on the company dime for work on a regular basis. There's a constant flow of traffic between all the teeming worlds of humanity, as teleconferencing is pretty dodgy at ranges of light-seconds, and between star systems is right out (the government charges an awful lot for use of their warp point commo repeaters!) and most of those people are moving about on two-way tickets. And frankly, none of them are keen on being rendered unconscious and stuffed in a freezer every time they want to pop over to Mars from Luna to meet with new clients. Even if they were, putting someone in cryogenic stasis is no trivial matter and there could be grave medical repercussions for entering and exiting cryo repeatedly in a short timeframe - once every six to eight months is the optimistic assumption - a year or more according to pessimistic doctors.

Naturally, the government makes a good chunk of change off taxing the passenger liner business. And just as naturally, when events prompt the government to either authorize mass immigration to a new colony, or mandate mass evacuation of same, passenger lines are quick to jump at the government contracts.

tl;dr Replace a large percentage of Colony Ships generated with Passenger Liners. As companies make more money and build more ships... they tend to build more passenger liners because, economically, there's just not room for nearly as many colonist transports as there is regular passenger service.

It's basic, but I admit I don't know if there is a solution.  Is it possible to move several ships at once from one fleet to another? Ctrl-click does not work for multi-selection, but I can't imagine that after all these years Steve is still moving 36 fighters, one click at a time, from one fleet to another (fighters, FACs, or whatever; you get the idea!).

Hey vorpal,

If you want to move multiple ships between fleets in Aurora 4X.  You can try to hold down the Shift key and click on each ship you want to move to select them then right-click on one of the selected ships to open the context menu after this you can choose the "Move To Fleet" option from the context menu and select the destination fleet for the selected ships.

If this method is not useful let me know.

Thanks,
James