A blueprint for new colonies so you don't have to micromanage all the building and terraforming

nice and well described idea.

Maybe it should be a new technology in the late game, that has to be researched. Or maybe a function to clone systems (use same history of constructions and ship building).

I believe that there is a cleaner implementation.

1. Let's assume that it is late game, and as the OP described, they have plenty of resources, such that they are routinely applying the same builds.

2. When there is a newly colonized system, proceed with adding items to the build queue.

3. Click a button, Remember Queue, which makes note of your items, plus the initial planet's qualities (i.e., hot, cold, temperate, gas, etc.), and the FIDS.

4. The next time that a new system is colonized, the build queue is automatically populated according to the closest match with previous times that you had clicked the Remember Queue button.

For (3), there can be one-or-more build "impressions" that you have saved. If you had already clicked Remember Queue, and then made a correction to the queue, then click Remember Queue to overwrite the previous impression.

For (4), if the automated populating of the build queue is not quite right, then tweak it and click Remember Queue. This will overwrite the impression if you already had a match for the given planet, or create a new impression if there hadn't been one for the planet.

Finally, there needs to be a Clear Queue button, just in case you needed to make an exception, or the build impression is simply wildly off.

A sorely missed feature from GalCiv was governors - in a different sense than heroes here. In GalCiv 1, you had the option to manage multiple saved queues of improvements, and you could then assign any of these queues (represented by governors) to newly colonized planets. I would be very happy if some form of this made its way to Endless Space 2!

I hadn't realised how much I needed it before seeing this idea! It is very common lategame to queue 10-20 improvements on a new colony and then buy them out. So that's 20-40 clicks that don't really need any human thought put into them, per colony, that are very tedious.

A simple Build Order Planner interface would greatly reduce this tedium and let players concentrate on the things that could benefit from human input!

A step further would be to enable this for ship production, a Fleet Build Order Planner.

It might even help with improving the AI if ES2 collects the Fleet/Build Order Plans (templates) all players produce, heuristic learning. I think that's how Galactic Civilization 2 improved its AI, the devs simply collected data on what players do and taught the AI to use the same strategies.

Enable auto buy out if funds are sufficient.