Suggestion for a small tweek to Asteroid Mining behaviour. Moving on a little from a previous post on symbols now that I have used DA a bit more.

Mining Stations are grouped in a number varying from 2 to 5 (?). It currently defaults to beaming the resource to the nearest Owning Race Planet, which is fine as there is the easy option on screen of redirecting the output as needed. At the end of a mining session you need to physically move the miner to the next in the group of mining stations.

The latter seems pointless micro-management as I cant think why - in 99% of scenarios - an individual would not want to utilise the miner immediately on another mining station in the same group. If the miner were programmed to automatically move into the next mining station in a group, it would remove a considerable micro-management issue. All options could be covered by a simple popup dialogue box "finished - ok to move to next one?" - the latter would cover a rare(ish) scenario where the player wanted to move it to another group of mining stations entirely before the current group was finished.

Mining Station output is important to the owning race, and its very easy (especially on Gigantic Maps) to "forget" to check to move it to the next station, its impossible to track manually. To be sure that a move is needed, you need to check every miner on every turn to see how things are going. Thats a hassle on a Gigantic Map, and an auto nove function would remove what is only a pure game mechanic.

The code could include a simple simple selection criteria of which to do first in order of priority within its movement-point range eg: Standard, Intermediate, Advanced and Ultimate mining moduals. At the end of a mining session(s) on a group of mining stations, the miner should then take on a different symbol/colour as a temporary indicator prior to reverting to its default symbol when moved, that yells "Hey, all done, where to next?"

The utility of this on a zoomed in medium/large map may not be apparent to some, but try managing a dozen or so of them, amongst 12 - 24 Asteroid Belts being mined, on a Gigantic Map, on a zoomed out interface, particularly mid-late game when there are literally hundreds of icons on screen ...... the problem then becomes much clearer.

Regards
Zy