Your basically asking for civilians to get orbital miners in addition to the sorium harvesters they can already get. As long as people can turn it off I have no qualms with this and it would push civies to completeness.
Pretty much yeah. I would consider civies in a more complete state when:
- They can do asteroid mining ( as suggested above )
- Civilian tankers ( and a few relevant trade goods they can ship ) are added
- All mined minerals & fuel from sites & harvesters are automatically delivered by civies to the systems largest colony ( once enough to be worth a freighter/tanker trip is in place at extraction site )
- All mined minerals & fuel end up in a civilian open market on that colony that you can conveniently buy from ( should probably also decay with about 2-5% yearly to account for civilian use unless there is some "buy all of it" option like for CMC currently )
- You can request civilian contracts for mineral & fuel delivery in addition to installations ( potentially also automated to maintain certain reserve levels that you have set )
- Ability to tax civilians by type of activity if you feel certain types of civilian growth are getting out of hand ( even raising their taxes taxing them to death if you want to )
- Ability to prioritize civilian freighter activity between infrastructure delivery, other trades, contracts and mineral fetching ( potentially connected to above taxation levels )
I agree it's not for everyone, and that it could potentially lead to alot of extra computation and slowdowns so being able to limit them or turn it off would be great. But I think it would greatly help with automating the maintanance of larger empires. The way I look at civies is that I would rather the CPU spend 30 seconds extra on calculations while I read some more Aurora fiction instead of me having to spend 300 seconds on tedious repetetive tasks in the game to accomplish a similar result.