#1: On the shipyard thing, what with colonies in GC4, to me it makes sense that one core world gets one shipyard and vice versa. You don't want your core worlds to be too close to each other. It took me a couple of playthroughs to realize that I need to let some large planets remain colonies. In general, if a large colony (say size 25 or bigger) has a decay of 30% or more, I'll consider making it a core world. Any closer to another core would require a special circumstance for me to assign a leader to it.

#2: This is a good idea, although there may be a way to do it we don't know about.

#3: Doesn't seem out of whack now, but I wasn't paying much attention to it.

#4: Excellent idea. Would speed up the game quite a bit, especially when pirates and other baddies are around to eat your probes early on.

Another one from me:

#5: I just won by Conquest on a medium map and my prestige was at 98% and barely moving. I even did the archive challenge to boost Prestige from 90% to 98%. I'd say a Prestige victory should be easier to achieve than Conquest. A few updates ago Prestige victory was too easy, now it's too hard and not relevant.

Cheers,
CB

I just edited my comment a bit. Hopefully it's not too confusing.

Cheers,
CB

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6. UI Quirks

6.1 Population Stats

I love all the data and detail given to the underlying population; however, much of this is glossed over and not fully explained.  Additionally, the UI presentation leaves much to be desired.

Nowhere in the UI does it clearly specify the Pop Type. ???  You have to infer this information from a strange combination of tooltips and right-click menus.

For example, what is the Pop Type of the following?

From the icon, we deduce it is "food" related.  But is it a "Farmer" or "BioAg" ?

If you hover over the icon for the pop type, it gives you a pop up explaining it:

Also, you can hover over the emoji icon on the bottom right to get more detail about their happiness:

I do agree that I think they can condense some of the repeated items, however.

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6.1 Population Stats

Please pick a standard data field ordering format and stick to it.  As a user, in the absence of a data table, we have to quickly mouse-over the population, one after the other, to get a glimpse of the citizen characteristics.  However, when the ordering of the fields is inconsistent, it makes processing this information all that more difficult and tedious.  (seriously, after a couple of hours of this, it brings on a migraine for me...)