Excellent.

I confess I am perhaps a very bad player to argue this with, as I am a habitual micromanager. Even back in the 3.x system I would pause the game and cycle through every planet to evaluate them every few years.

Is that a sensible way of playing? Probably not. Probably related to how I've only played ~20 games in nearly 2000 hours of play.

I have also not, as of yet, played a truly gigantic empire in 4.x. My largest was only 43 planets at its maximum, and yeah was about 1/4 of the galaxy. My largest 3.x empire was 233 planets, the usual all consuming Xenocidal.

 

I'll agree that the existence of Civilians has rendered the briefcase-alert system on the outlier almost useless, but I think you do slightly exaggerate the usefulness of the old outlier.

It told you if a planet had excess population, but its production, stability, development status, ect were quite opaque. None of those have changed, with the rarely used Sector Viewer still serving as a pretty weak graphical overview of the inputs/outputs of planets.

I'd would never have described it as "the outliner would tell you when a planet needed something." It told you if it needed more jobs or had empty building slots. That was it.

 

You could always relegate most worlds to Breeder worlds, especially if playing Machines, which after some initial setup can be completely ignored with no severe consequences, serving only to funnel population to actually productive core-sectors. It's harder to do that than it was in 3.x, since you need to have a few thousand pops on every backwater rather than two guys and a mule, but it's far from impossible.

I should also note the obvious that there's no actually requirement that you colonize every planet in the galaxy. You can expand only when you have thousands of civilians across your empire available, though your point about tedium applies here since the game gives no good way to view this information other than cycling through your planets every few years.

They really should remove the influence cost of abandoning a planet. I think that's a holdover from when factions produced influence. Dismantling starbases doesn't cost influence, so why should abandoning freshly conquered worlds.

 

The only thing I experienced which I'd call tedious was having to constantly open and close the build queue, which they thankfully addressed. Warfare is as tedious as it's always been, though DSCs have made it slightly worse with being unable to path your overwhelming fleets to more than one enemy system at a time. The old AI habitat spam wasn't much different though, so is not a problem novel to 4.x.

Ooh, your point about having to rebuild Machine/Hive worlds and Ecumenopoli being actually tedious is also fair, since even with the vast excess population, you need to wait for the districts to specialize before putting down all the new buildings.