Basically I've come to the conclusion that colony management should be treated like combat. Large maps will quickly become untenable for multiplayer with the amount of time it takes to manage 20+ colonies and even mid to late game single player colony management becomes a chore rather than an interesting part of the game. So my suggestion is that all colonies are administered by a governor, the player chooses why type of colony should be build but the governor actually builds it and manages it like the battle system where the AI makes targeting decisions.
The reasons for this are as follows.
As the no tactical battles crowd is fond of saying, GalCiv is a strategic game and the player should not be micromanaging every battle. I think the same logic should be applied to colony management, you play the leader of an empire you shouldn't micromanage anything, you should delegate authority to achieve your goals. Also if you have the time to specify where each building in the empire is build then why can't you develop your own targeting criteria at least and at most provide tactical input on battles.
Time to play a game, while spending a week on a single player game is fine, multiplayer shouldn't take that long and getting the same players together to play a large multiplayer game over the course of a week or more is unlikely. Even on insane a multiplayer game shouldn't take more than a day, maybe 12 hours or so but as the game works now it would take a ridiculous amount of time, planning and coordination to finish a multiplayer game on one of the larger map sizes.
This would resolve the issue with colony capital placement as all buildings locations would be chosen by the AI and likely a balance pass would optimize it as well. Planet size optimization would also likely follow.
Fun, players can concentrate on accomplishing their in game goals rather than have to pay attention to whether its time to switch out projects or choosing every terraforming tile as they become available which quickly becomes tedious. Diplomacy, ship design, fleet operations and so on become the focus of gameplay instead of micromanaging every colony.
A few things would have to be developed to allow for this style of gameplay as well.
Many players would want to be able to customize their governor's templates so an option to do so would have to be implemented.
A priority system would have to be implemented to determine which governor can rush buildings, also a reserve on the treasury would be useful so money would be available for ship upgrades.
I don't know what is planned for governors at the moment but it would likely have to be expanded to allow for this option.
Governor settings would need to be put in place, how large you want your planetary populations, what morale level is expected, etc. I'm sure I'm not even thinking of all of the options that people would want.
I would also love a similar system for starbases but I'll leave that out for this thread.
What say you?