Usability question

Use hotkeys!

If you're playing against the AI, use meaningful and organized names for everything. (If you're playing against humans, use seemingly random names but have an index... advanced techniques in deliberately misleading names are probably not good until you are more comfortable with things

Use fleets for organizational purposes, even on noncombat units; this cuts down on the number of individual things you have to give orders to each turn. Combat fleets should have meaningfully named task forces within them, with appropriate orders, even if you're planning on controlling most of your combat personally in tactical mode; ideally you should be able to leave the unimportant battles to the computer.

Learn the keyboard shortcuts; adjust the pop-up help settings to provide an appropriate level of detail but not slow you or your computer down.

Fiddle around with the settings that control what is displayed on a planet icon, to show what you're interested in when you quickly glance at a system and strip off anything you don't use. Everyone has different preferences, and the defaults are unlikely to be best for you.

Use colony type names and have them mean something, particularly on small worlds. For instance, you might decide that any world you mark "Intelligence Center" or "Research Center" that has 5 facility spaces or less (all domed colonies, and Tiny worlds of your atmosphere) will simply have the queue filled up with the appropriate facility when you colonize and ignored thereafter.

Unless it's critically important to get every last possible edge, do your ship upgrades in blocks, and keep the number of variants of your units down. If you're fighting to hold on to an important system and desperately researching (say) fighter weapons, it may be important to redesign your fighters every turn and assign exactly the amount you can build this turn to queues; but under normal circumstances this sort of thing leads to a real clutter of units that don't stack and are a hassle to manage.

The user interface needs a lot of work to make empire management efficient.

I duno... there's a number of things that, once you find them make things a hell of a lot easyer. unfortunatly these are not defult. (what was aaron thinking?)
here's my list:

firstly, the news log. click the little eye icon above the pictures colomn, this will make the pictures smaller, or no pictures at all.

in the empire options, next/prev. select
"skip ships in fleets" and,
"skip ships that are constructing things" you may want to click
"skip ships that are damaged", but I don't normaly use it.

now you want to setup your construction queues custom lists.
go to the construction queues screen (big spanner icon on the top row of buttons, not the individual queues) this gives you a list of all your planets, unfortunaly the defult is prety sucky and doesn't give you very good information.
click the layout button, scroll down and click "create custom layout" (you can't edit defult ones)
I have these sellected:

Queue picture.
Queue name.
Space yard rate minerals.
Item under construction name.
Item under construction time remaining.
Status icons.
Can construct ships.

Queue picture:
just gives you a visual so you can easly see wether it's a planet, ship or base, again - once you've created the custom layout, click the little eye icon above this colomn to get a smaller picture.

Queue name:
so you know which system the planet is in. It can be handy to rename your bases space yards to include the system name too.

Space yard rate minierals:
so you know how fast it can build things - don't bother with the organics or rads, most the time your ships cost more in minerals than organics and radioactives anyway.

Item under construction name:
so you've got an idea of whats building.

Item under construciton time remaining:
if this is down to 0.1 and you've got plenty of resorces left, then add something else. I'm currently bugging aaron to include a "Items under construction TOTAL time remaining" this would make this whole process a bit easyer, at the moment you have to go through each of the queues showing 0.1 to see if there's anything else queued after it. if we have total time, then it's a peice of pi.. err cake to just select a bunch of the 0.1 queues and add something to all of them.

Status icons:
I use these to see which planets don't have troops, weapon platforms, and fighters. if you click the queue name colomn and get it to sort by name, you can make sure your front line planets all have a deacent number of WPs Fighters and Troops.

Can construct ships:
makes it so you can sort it better.
normaly I click the time remaining colomn, then can construct ships colomn for sorting prioritys.

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doing a simular thing with the colonys screen is good too. have:
Picture
Name
value mins
value orgs
value rads
facility space used
facility space total
item under construction.

this settup is usefull for deciding what facilitys to build where. I'm currently bugging arron for a "facility space left" (counting what's already in the build queue)

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an se5a is a ww1 fighter, it is also a car.

Yes I hate haveing to reset each of these interface things, by default they're unusable. Every time you start a new empire you have to reset all these interface settings and then save your empire.

SEV, more than a feeling.

Stop at each location only once will stop at each location once... till you've done all the locations then it will cycle back to the first one. I don't find it that usefull.

yeah having lots of fighter squads can be a pain, I usualy don't bother with them and just use carriers.
when building carriers I usualy have a planet building them on repeat, then a string of non space yard planets building fighters on repeat to the front line. as the carrier comes of the production line I order it to collect fighters from each of these planets then to the waypoint.

I think you can fleet fighter squads, so if you've got more than one fighter squad in one location you could try that.

with there not being enough room horizontaly you have to decide what's important to you and not just have everything in there. that's why I use the colony list as well, the colony list I use to decide where to build facilitys, the construction queues list I use to build ships, units and fighters. if you're playing compeditivly you want to grow your econ at the same speed as you grow your fleet. if you grow your fleet too fast you end up running out of resorces, if you grow your econ you end up getting heaps of resorces, but they are all going to waste, you're better off building ships till your econ just starts going into the negitives, then open the colony screen and work out which planet has the best value of whichever resorce you're short off.
say you colonize a large planet which has high mineral value. if at this stage of the game you've got plenty of resorces you're better off just building a spaceyard and building ships, once your expences start catching up you start building mineral miners on the planet instead of ships.
on planets that have low value in everything, you just fill the queue up with reserch and intel. (after you've built a spaceyard and posibly a resuply depot)

I use the build rate for a couple of things, on a faster queue I will build larger ships, on slower queues I'll build smaller ships, frigates and the like. it's also usefull to check if you've not upgraded a spaceyard base or factory when you get that next level of spaceyard. if you don't use it though, yeah, don't bother with it.

If you want a total time to construct colomn, then please, email aaron and tell him. if it's just me requesting it then he will put it off, if there's a bunch of us requesting it he's more likely to do it. se5(at)malfador.com

the colony list is usefull because it has the planet values in them, you can also get it to list population hapieness and other things as well. even if there was a horizontal scroll a "facility space remaining" would be far more usable than having "facility space used" and "facility space total" it's far easyer to priotize with just one colomn, since you can prioritize the value you want, then the space left. when you start having to prioritize three colomns it becomes a pain.

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an se5a is a ww1 fighter, it is also a car.

I never use tactical combat,
it's not fair on the AI, I prefer to see myself at the overlord of a grand empire. let the ship captians take care of the battles and such, I'm content to just set the strategies on the designs and let them go for it, watching the replay (I only ever play similtanious turns, even against the AI)

I'm pushing for better a better strategy layout, but I don't know that it will ever happen.
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an se5a is a ww1 fighter, it is also a car.