Been having a lot of hours of my life sucked out from playing crusader kings 2 and ran across a really neat mechanic that I'm really enjoying. One of the things I find tedious about having large empires is managing every single colony/country/planet/etc when my empire gets very big. But with CK2 (I believe Rome 2 does something similar too) you have counties that fall into a predefined duchy. Once you control those counties you can get the duchy which then lumps them together and allows a degree of automation in the individual counties. Once you get enough duchies, you have the opportunity to get a kingdom. Once enough kingdoms, an empire.
Don't get me wrong, I love micromanaging. What I find tedious is when I have to do this with sea of worlds I've conquered. In the beginning of a GC2 game I would be very attached to the well being of my first few worlds. But after that number began to grow and grow and grow, each new world just became more or less an extra number. And then going through all worlds to establish build orders and queues just became a chore.
I just thought it would be neat if something like in CK2 carries over. Like say you acquire a few systems which then become part of a sector. If you want then you could still have the opportunity to individually tweak those worlds within that sector or you could just say I want this sector to focus on a general area like economy or ship building and it would make that it's focus.
And then once you get enough sectors you can get <insert neat sci-fi sounding title here> and the cycle repeats.
So now instead of having 100 worlds which I really love having but don't love microing, you could have say 5 'realms' consisting of 4 'sectors' consisting of individual systems and worlds.
And if you like, still allow micromanagement to your heart's content.
Just thought this was a really nice approach to large empire handling.
Cheers!