UI - Governors - Upgrade Planetary Improvement Type

Well, one of the Devs just made the mistake of encouraging input, so I figured I'd fire off another one. I searched to see if there was something similar, but nothing particularly detailed and it was in another forum.

Desired features:
1) ability to have my improvements not auto-upgrade when a new improvement becomes available that obsoletes the existing improvement. This is unessential since I can just mod all the obsolete tags out, but it would be nice to keep them since it shuffles the obsolete buildings to the "Old" tab.

2) ability to tell all planets to upgrade all tiles with a certain improvement (say, "Basic Factory") to another improvement (say, "Factory"). It would be a bonus to have "No Improvement" in the "upgrade from" list and "Decommission" in the "upgrade to" list, but not essential.

Implementation suggestions:
1) a checkbox in game options, just like the "throw-away-movement-left-after-autopilot" one.

2) an additional option on the Governor screen called "Planetary Improvements" or what ever sounds ok.

Left list ("Upgrade From") = list of planetary improvements, sorted alpha, filtered by:
- must be available tech wise OR must exist in the empire somewhere

Right list ("Upgrade To") = list of planetary improvements, sorted alpha, filtered by:
- must be available tech wise
- must not be galactic achievement or super project

User hits "submit" button =
- For Each Planet controlled by User
-- For Each Tile on Planet
--- If Tile's improvement = Left list improvement
---- If Tile (and Planet) is eligible for Right list improvement
----- Queue upgrade of Tile to Right list improvement
---- End If
--- End If
-- End Loop
- End Loop

One slightly tricky question is how to determine if a tile is eligible for the right list improvement. Off the top of my head:
- made it through the right list filter
- does not have a "only x per planet" restriction OR fewer than x currently exist on planet
- tile is not currently building/upgrading something else (I'm not sure if this is a desirable condition, but it could get messy to not use it)

Why:
There are lots of times I hold back on researching tech (particularly industry tech) because I don't want the game to auto-upgrade my old improvements and kill my economy with maintenance cost. On the other hand even in a fairly sparse Gigantic galaxy I'm likely to have over 50 planets, each of them with a fair number of tiles, and it would take a LONG time to go through and manually upgrade all my Basic Factories to Factories when I finally wanted to do so (this assumes I've modded out the obsolete-ing relationship between the two). I'm not necessarily opposed to micromanagement, but I rather like to avoid the sort that is not fun and also very time consuming.

Specifically, this would make my all-factories super hive strategy much easier to pull off

Notes:
Yes, this could result in inefficiency, like not making proper use of a bonus square, but I'm willing to accept that tradeoff for this ability (and the tradeoff would not have to be made by those not wishing to use the feature).

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Hmm, I like this idea. Upgrading buildings always seems too automatic to me. Another thing I'd like to suggest is a way to upgrade all buildings of a type on one planet. It would be rather tedious to individually upgrade 20 research buildings on my main research planet.

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1) ability to have my improvements not auto-upgrade when a new improvement becomes available that obsoletes the existing improvement. This is unessential since I can just mod all the obsolete tags out, but it would be nice to keep them since it shuffles the obsolete buildings to the "Old" tab.

You can already stop auto-upgrade. If you click on the 'Details' button at the bottom of the planet screen, one of the buttons on the side is 'Governor'. Click on that and you will have two options: 'Auto Upgrade Improvements as they become available' and 'Automatically Terraform as technology becomes available'. Both are set by default; I usually unset them. This only applies to the selected planets, so if you want to deactivate it for all of your planet, you will have to change it manually for each new world you colonize.

A global setting for this would be nice.

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If you click on the 'Details' button at the bottom of the planet screen, one of the buttons on the side is 'Governor'. Click on that and you will have two options: 'Auto Upgrade Improvements as they become available' and 'Automatically Terraform as technology becomes available'.

Thank you for reminding me of that, I had forgotten.

And I can achieve the equivalent of a global setting for the first by modding out all the obsolete-ing relationships, so the dev's don't strictly have to change anything for me to be able to do what I'm asking for in 1). The main thing I'm trying for here, as described in 2), is the ability to mass-upgrade improvements at the time of my choosing rather than whenever I happen to get my hands on the tech.

Another example of "why": in pretty much every game of mine the upgrade from basic factory (0 maintenance) to factory (1 maintenance) does very "interesting" things to my economy, so I typically have to avoid researching that tech until I'm ready (even though I'd really like the higher level starbase modules). Once, I needed to fight a war, but was genuinely concerned that I might get the tech by planetary conquest. I did, and my economy didn't' like me for a while. It would have been much worse if they had had, say, Industrial Sector. The point being that the chance of getting these techs in war should not be a persuasion for me to *not* go to war because it would put me in the situation of choosing a trashed economy or an hour (or hours) of micromanagement going through all my planets at a later date upgrading all the industry buildings.

Anyway, if this is too much trouble for the Devs I can live with the current situation, but it would be very nice and it seems (seems) to me that it could be done without going against the grain of the existing programming or getting in the way of users who don't want the feature.

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