This is more a 'what do people think', not necessarily a suggestion thread/question. Though I do like the idea myself.
Quite often when I am playing I have certain regions of my empire consisting of groupings of planets/starbases/shipyards collectively working together doing specific goals. Yet I have to manage them all individually. As the game progresses it all becomes a little overwhelming and often confusing keeping it all organized.
What do people think about a grouping function where you could select multiple planets and/or starbases that are adjacent to one another and form a state or province. Each state could have its own production wheel and perhaps a screen to manage the region as a whole. I have provided some screenshots below:
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HOW WE SEE IT NOW:
So the image below is how it is now in the game. Though I can manage it is a bunch of scattered icons on the screen... It works but the more stuff that gets colonized and built the tougher it is to sort out...
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MY MOCK-UP:
This is something I whipped up quickly. Basically when zooming out into the tactical view your 'states' could be outlined with shaded hexes and make it easy to differentiate between important regions you want to have do different things. Also as you can see on the right I copied what is being done in the Diplomacy/Trade screen with collapsible menus. So upon defining a state or region it would create a collapsible menu that you could expand - where only the planets and/or starbases from that area are visible. This could really clean up the side menu and make things easier to manage.
Also when getting into larger galaxies with tons of stuff on the map to manage, if a particular planet or starbase is listed as part of a specific state you will know from memory what area of the map it is on without having to keep going back to the map to see where it is.
As you can see I named my initial expansion area Terra Prime so if I get an idle colony message and click into the planet screen of say, a generic name of 'Morgellon V', if the planet screen states it is part of Terra Prime I know where it is. This memory association of regions would streamline my planet management not sure about other people.
Also a Region Screen could have all your planets/starbases/shipyards at a glance and you could manage higher level things in that screen and adjust production for the state as a whole.
I dunno - just a thought. What does everyone think?