Population rally point or auto population/food movement.

I came here to post a similar idea. Not sure if I should post it here as a reply or start a new idea topic... here goes.

Population management is a big part of ES2; this is especially true for some factions, but it is also involved in some quests and resource optimization. For example, say you have a minor faction in your empire with a science bonus on cold planets and you have a system that's all cold planets. You want that minor faction to go to that system. Currently you have to figure out what planets they're on, and the only way to do that is by flipping through the planets manually. The population screen shows how many of that population are in your empire, but not where they are. Once you find a planet populated with them, you cannot drag the population from the left side of the planet management screen - you have to find the populations on the planets and drag them from there into the spaceport. That's literally the only way to move populations. You also need to set the spaceport to the correct system. (If you're like me and like to play in huge galaxies with 7+ factions, there's a lot of systems in late game). Good luck remembering the exact name of the system with all the cold planets in it! Overall the current population management is so irritating that I completely give up on it.

Oh and by the way... those ellipses aren't clickable. I have 23 population on that system for which I have no idea what faction they are, but I know there's 6 or less of each of them. (One of them must be my original species, too.)

What I would propose instead is an entirely different way of managing populations. Let them move themselves (voluntary migration through freighters) and allow the player to institute policy regarding movement at the Empire Level and at the System Level.

At the Empire level, on the Population Overview  screen put a button to the left of the populations that determines whether they're allowed to migrate or not. (Obviously players are going to want to lock down Cravers and maybe Sowers if they're using them to restore depleted planets.) This space is currently empty. Make it researchable if that's important.

At the system level, make the population circle that shows growth a clickable button  with a list that looks a lot like the Population Overview screen. Add little on/off sliders to determine which populations are allows to migrate in and out of that system.

Then the biggest part is giving each faction (major AND minor) a climate preference for planets, and doing the under the hood programming work. Allowing each system to release 1 population every X turns for migration. Populations are obviously going to move to systems with empty population slots and preferred climates (within the empire migration policy rules). As a caveat, when populations reach a system that has become full during travel they need to redirect somehow.

Implementing this kind of population management system on top of the current spaceport system gives the player a lot more control and flexibility over population management. The only other additions I would suggest is making populations draggable from the left side of the system management screen, and creating a basic genocidal technology that allows population to be sacrificed (like Chain Gang or Virtual Dustylizer) where the population can be targeted. (And the reason I suggest THAT, is because if you are Horatio and you splice genes but have an extra pop or two, you really want to remove them to fill those population slots with Horatio clones.)

One last extra point... suppose it's late game and I colonize a new system. Suppose I razed it (or obliterated it and then used Engineering Behemoths to restore the planets). I could instantly fill the population slots by going to my full systems and dragging population from the overpopulated slots into the spaceport and selecting the new system. With the above migration system in place, the player can set guidelines/policy for which factions are allowed to migrate and those systems release 1 population per X turns, filling it quickly but also topping up systems where terraforming takes place and opens up new population slots. This reduces micromanagement on the part of the player while still allowing the player to manage the empire.