The Colony Planner is braindead

[Cyclopsslayerr]

Having to manually set all the population Policies is an onerous task once you meet all the races and have a lot of worlds. Especially having to redo it every time you meet a new race.
I missed setting the policy on a Zenox colony and some Gizuran outbred and replaced them and this happened...



As can be seen once the colony became Giz, the Zenox died off or were shipped elsewhere... There are only 50 Zenox left on the planet. 50, not 50 thousand or 50 million... 50

[Spidey]

I want to say that your language is over the top but, well, it is and yet it sort of isn't. This is another aspect of the UI that really could do with some polish.

Frankly, the entire UI is a bit on the clunky side. There's no drag and drop anywhere, a lot of scrolling with small scrollbars, no highlighting of the presently selected entry in a list, and in the case of the colony menu, the access to resource management and population management for a particular colony are both based on hovering very close to the same place, meaning the windows can get in each others way easily.

It might be helpful to think more in terms of "how would this task actually be carried out by a user?" rather than typical dev-utilitarian "can we fit in some functionality somewhere? Oh right, here's an empty spot!".

[WiZz]

How many colonies does topicstarter have? The game already has high level of automation, so tweaking of migration policy isn't difficult.

[Spidey]

It is always problematic when "why not just use automation?" becomes the answer to a badly designed UI. One might take that reasoning just a tiny step further and ask why one should even play the game at all, since it's perfectly capable of running by itself on full auto? Just switch that on, turn speed to max, then go make yourself a sandwich and a cup of tea. Ah, what a nice way to play the game, right? And then maybe go find a book or switch on the telly, no?

The task the OP is referring to is not an unreasonable one. And it is not obvious how one would perform that task in a reasonable way at present. And if we look on the UI as a whole, there really are quite a few things that just aren't quite as polished as they could be, to phrase it politely.

[Cyclopsslayerr]

How many colonies does topicstarter have? The game already has high level of automation, so tweaking of migration policy isn't difficult.

At the point of the original post, I had 61 colonies.
Having to go back through the entire colony list every time you meet a new species. There is a button to apply these settings to all colonies, but that is only appropriate if you have a single-race empire. Start adding Independents, find a colony ship, conquer another empire, and that button is less than useful.

Full story of that world. It was a Zenox colonized world when I had only met a handful of species. Growth slowed as I started a war against a couple of neighbors. The war ended and I was fiddling only with their worlds. A quick overview of my worlds and I saw Zenox in control there with more than 1B population. I failed to investigate the '+others'
Later, I had the money and was going through to spam Terraformers (+20 Qual) on all my worlds when I saw the picture in the original post.

I don't know if the over-population died off or migrated away, but it went from >1B to the 200M above. Setting the policy across 61 worlds showed several species gaps. Since even 1 person of another race increases corruption I was quick to shift any offenders away. A side effect of limiting Migration, my Resorts were busy converting visitors to cash. +180K per year at the times of the original post, triple that 20 years later when that world became Zenox again and had grown to like 1.3B again.
Having met all the species now setting the Pop Policy once is now good. But, if I had just left it all to the AI, how many worlds would it have Ruined? How many 200M pop worlds would it gleefully create?

[Cyclopsslayerr]

It is always problematic when "why not just use automation?" becomes the answer to a badly designed UI. One might take that reasoning just a tiny step further and ask why one should even play the game at all, since it's perfectly capable of running by itself on full auto? Just switch that on, turn speed to max, then go make yourself a sandwich and a cup of tea. Ah, what a nice way to play the game, right? And then maybe go find a book or switch on the telly, no?

The task the OP is referring to is not an unreasonable one. And it is not obvious how one would perform that task in a reasonable way at present. And if we look on the UI as a whole, there really are quite a few things that just aren't quite as polished as they could be, to phrase it politely.

The Task of manually setting the Population Policy when I had 5 worlds and 3 species wasn't tough at all. Having to do it for each individual new colony wasn't bad. However, having to do the entire colony list again and again and again, with each new species is why I called the task 'onerous'.
Some species do nothing but grow like mice within the walls of the empire. Wekkaraus, Ugnari, Gizurean, (sic all) have all caused issues and I really desire a 'Bigot' option button to ban these from ALL of my worlds.
The game itself tells you that more than one race per world is bad by adding corruption, yet the mechanics of the AI want nothing more than to shift people everywhere. I WANT migration from an overpopulated world to a new world of that species. I don't want the game lying to me when it says 'Colonize this world with Ackdarians' then it ships Gizureans instead, or if it does ship the Ackdarians it really shouldn't migrate in species that HATE the destination world type.

[Spidey]

It is always problematic when "why not just use automation?" becomes the answer to a badly designed UI. One might take that reasoning just a tiny step further and ask why one should even play the game at all, since it's perfectly capable of running by itself on full auto? Just switch that on, turn speed to max, then go make yourself a sandwich and a cup of tea. Ah, what a nice way to play the game, right? And then maybe go find a book or switch on the telly, no?

The task the OP is referring to is not an unreasonable one. And it is not obvious how one would perform that task in a reasonable way at present. And if we look on the UI as a whole, there really are quite a few things that just aren't quite as polished as they could be, to phrase it politely.

The Task of manually setting the Population Policy when I had 5 worlds and 3 species wasn't tough at all. Having to do it for each individual new colony wasn't bad. However, having to do the entire colony list again and again and again, with each new species is why I called the task 'onerous'.
Some species do nothing but grow like mice within the walls of the empire. Wekkaraus, Ugnari, Gizurean, (sic all) have all caused issues and I really desire a 'Bigot' option button to ban these from ALL of my worlds.
The game itself tells you that more than one race per world is bad by adding corruption, yet the mechanics of the AI want nothing more than to shift people everywhere. I WANT migration from an overpopulated world to a new world of that species. I don't want the game lying to me when it says 'Colonize this world with Ackdarians' then it ships Gizureans instead, or if it does ship the Ackdarians it really shouldn't migrate in species that HATE the destination world type.

I'm having similar issues, as it happens, mostly because I've got a touch of OCD regarding what races goes where. I actually want all the races to come live in my Ackdarian interstellar coherence, but I want mostly pure race colonies. Humans here, Sluken there, Dhayuts on this desert and Teekans on that one. That way I'll have an easy way of getting the next batch of colonists of whatever race is needed for that world.

But the unfortunate reality is that this means I have to go through each world and carefully figure out which settings I want, hope it's not too late for the excess to be moved through shuttles, and then I have to do this for each darn colony every time I run into a new race. And there's no shortcut or anything. The current UI support for this just isn't great.

Frankly, I'd kill for a dedicated colony screen with better filtering and more options, to supplement the excessively cramped colony menu, and a related race screen where I could see where each race is allowed to live inside my empire.

[Cyclopsslayerr]

Frankly, I'd kill for a dedicated colony screen with better filtering and more options, to supplement the excessively cramped colony menu, and a related race screen where I could see where each race is allowed to live inside my empire.

Yes. So, yes!
When I was dropping the Terraformers the mouseover, check the popup, yes this world can still be T-formed, or no, this world is as good as it gets. Was necessary, but such a bothersome task.
A sort feature, show me damaged worlds, show me terraformable worlds, etc. I imagine it will only explode into tediousness as the repeatable techs get unlocked...

EDIT: 83 worlds now, and some of the ex-pat AI worlds are going to take decades to repair. They are costing 60K in support a year due to over-population, wrong species, etc... The AI seems to have mostly T-formed its worlds, which is good. The War Score was closing on +1B, after taking 22 worlds, burning off another that irritated me (go go Transient Singularities) and killing every Base/Station I can find. Other than Super Techs, which I have very few, there is no tech left to develop. So the war was extremely unfair.