After playing a while, I really started wishing for a way to automate my factories and rally my ships at specific destinations. A quick search of the forums (good search feature guys!) has this mentioned within one non-specific post, so I'll quote RicoDevega, as he hits the high points:

RicoDevega wrote:


Rally Points

This is an RTS standard, and a sad rarity for TBS... I can't think of any that have done it since Master of Orion. In the early game, you have star lanes... and if you're an efficient turtler, you'll find the best available bottle neck as far away from your home as you can feasibly go. Later on, you're still using star lanes, but you have the option of skipping past and engaging warp engines or some such (the ai kept economy victorying me, so I'm not sure what it's called). In both situations, you're going to have frontier systems that are taking the majority of your enemies forces, and need constant reinforcements to avoid being obliterated. Having the option to move ships as soon as they're built, straight to the frontier would be a godsend. This ties in to the next two suggestions I have. I know this because my post got eated and only recovered to this point.



Repeat-Build

Another RTS standard, and not entirely rare in TBS land. The option to tell a system to keep building ships indefinitely. Sure, I could tell it to build a million ships... but what do I do when I suddenly want to change that?

Both Masters of Orion 3 and Space Empires IV have build queue locking, where the items in the queue are cycled through.



And one game (Galactic Civilizations?) gave you options as to what happens when the ships arrive at their rally point. They could merge into one big fleet, they could go hunting for enemies, they could launch an auto-explore.

Whilst this likely wouldn't be useful until late game when you will likely need and have the ability to sustain a total war economy it would be nice to see this as an option. That being said this might also be useful for churning out colony ships in the mid early game. It would also reduce the necesity to constantly manage systems in the late game without turning them over to AI control.

+1 - i'd like my ships to fly direct to the front line

I missed this as well. It shaves off quite a bit of the turn time even on small maps. Especially as you always have to get newly build ships out of your hangar with additional clicks.