I've read the user's manual several times, and I've done the tutorial, and I've studied the key bindings, and nowhere is it explained how to move ships once a game has gotten complicated.
In most 4X games, one can select a unit and hit a button that means "finish up preset path." That seems to be lacking here.
In most 4X games, there's a button that means "finish up all preset paths." That seems to be lacking here.
Therefore, the most efficient way I've found to control all my ships is (a) to make them all "stationed" at a planet or starbase, or moving along a preset path, then (
to scroll through the list of ships in the Resource Details display, clicking on ships that are marked as "idling" or "moving," then right-clicking at the end of the preset path to get a ship to move for that turn.
But this is very tedious and inefficient, for at least three reasons. First, you have to specifically move each unit every turn. Second, if a unit has a long preset path, there's a lot of time for scrolling the map every single turn for that one unit (even when the map is zoomed all the way out. Third, the list of ships in the Resource Details display shows every single ship, including all the ones that are stationed. So there is a great deal of scrolling past stationed ships, each and every turn.
I don't remember the controls in GalCiv2, but I don't think it was anywhere near this tedious.
The list of starbases in the Resource Details display has tabs that let you show (1) all, or (2) just shipyards, or (3) just starbases. That's very useful. I hope an upcoming patch will add tab settings like that to the ships display, so I can suppress the stationed ships.
I've played every version of GalCiv, all the way back to the original OS/2 version, which I think was the best of all because it was so novel and it was the only good game ever programmed for OS/2. I expect to devote a lot of time to GalCiv3, but I hope the issues above can be addressed.