After playing with aurora for a bit I keep hitting the following pain-points. They are listed bellow in order of severity, with 1 being the biggest problem.
1) Why oh why do we need to turn hyper on and off manually? Please just give the option to auto-turn it on and off when outside the hyperlimit. or just auto-suppress it inside the hyperlimit.
2) Along the same lines use path-finding to find when it would be better to use the in system jump points rather than go in a straight line. - this is minor in comparison to the hyperlimit thing though.
3) Auto-Assign civilian administrators. Naval and ground force officers are done reasonably, so why not civilian administrators? it saves a lot of tedium when your empire grows a bit larger.
4) It would be really need if you could share your world infrastructure with any other bioengineered sub-races on the same planet.
5) It would be nice if you could tell your engineers to not dig up those historic districts :p Further it would also be nice if you could tell them to stop at 1 installation left.
6) A warning about idle factories would be nice. We get one for idle research labs after-all. Disable the warning when the industry is shut down of course
7) Being able to set a queue for terraforming would be nice, alternately just add a warning when terraformers are idle.
1) The main reason is that I would have to check every hyper-capable fleet every sub-pulse to see if they are inside/outside the hyper limit. I would also have to go through every fleet in the game at the start of every increment and check every ship individually to decide whether to flag the entire fleet as hyper / non-hyper capable. So it's possible, but it would add to the length of each increment. Besides, you don't have to do it manually. You can set a waypoint and use the Enter/Leave Hyper orders.
2) This is not as easy as you think. I could check for an 'add in lagrange points' as part of the orders sequence but the LPs may not be in the same place when you give the order as when the fleet arrives in the system, which means they may no lonher be the quickest way. I could also check on a realttime basis but that means checking every fleet in the game on every sub-pulse to see if the current order could be better fulfilled by using LPs, and the player would need some way to override this if he didn't want a fleet to automatically do that.
3) With regard to system administrators, how does the game judge what bonuses you need for a particular colony? It's easy to figure out a terraforming ship needs a commander with a terraforming bonus, or a mobile infantry battalion needs a commander with ground combat bonus. Many colonies have a number of installations, all of which require different bonuses.
4) This might happen. I am looking at ways of separating industry from population but so far I haven't found anything I am happy with.
5) I may be being dim here
but why wouldn't you want to dig up the last ruin? Is it for alien artifact production?
6) You would get a lot more warnings for factories and they that would clutter up the events window. My experience is that most players seem to always run their research labs and based them on few planets but many colonies have various factory types and players often leave factories idle due to resource constraints rather than just forgetting about them.
7) A 'Terraformers idle' warning is a possibility
Just a note here, which is directed to everyone not just the OP. I know I have answered this mail in full because I just happened to have the time to do it right now but most of the time I read the individual suggestion posts, think I will come back to them and never do because I forget about them. The best place is the official suggestion thread. I know it sometimes looks like I don't answer them in that thread but when I do have time I will work my way through that thread to look for good suggestions. It may be weeks or months apart when I do that, but that thread is by far everyone's best change of getting a suggestion implemented in the long term.
If anyone has a long or complex suggestion then perhaps post it separately but add a post in the suggestions threads with a synopsis and a link to the main post, so if I do forget about the main post I will link to it when I review the main suggestions thread
Steve