That was when the micro-managing nightmare began. I had already worked out the best build order, and would queue up as many buildings as I could on all of my newly colonized planets. Unfortunately, planetary growth was always incredibly slow in the first few years, before my automated factories and deep core mines had been built, along with five or six other production-related buildings. I would also never feel safe until my laser and missile batteries were up. My economy was booming on the planets that I had previously colonized and built up, so money was no object (especially with two or three alien races paying tribute to supplement my income); as a result I would buy the first eight to twelve buildings queued up on every newly colonized planet. For the next twenty turns, as my colony ships made their way across the galaxy, I would find myself clicking on fifty different planets to buy the next building in queue. My turns began to last a half hour each, sometimes as long as 2 hours, as I micromanaged the snot out of my empire.

A similar problem was encountered the few times that I played Civ II. I would see an enemy army coming my way and would queue up three or four tanks, mechanized infantries, and howies in ten or fifteen of my more built up cities. My turns would then take an hour as I went around buying all of my tanks, howies, and infantrymen every turn. Again, a micromanagement nightmare.

It seems like it would be a relatively simple task to allow a unit on the queue to be auto-bought, so long as funds were available. The programming is already there to queue up a bunch of units, so it should take about a bit of information to say "auto-buy" or "do not auto-buy," and maybe a few lines of code to check that bit.

A more complicated option would be to allow a unit to be auto-bought when its price dropped below a critical value, and/or when it reached a certain percent completion. Unit prices decrease rapidly with only a few shields put into them, and if I were in a mild hurry to get my tanks I would say "buy the tank when it is 10% complete" and save a bundle of money. This adds a lot more code and is probably unnecessary, but hey, it never hurts to bring the idea up.