[igoblin]

I really like ministers and I used them a lot in SE III to handle all the colonization and facility building later in the game when I had too many colonies. In SE IV I haven't really used them because I had some bad experiences with them. The population minister drained all of population off of my homeworld reducing it to 1M pop instead of balancing the population between all my planets. And the minelaying minister would put minefields between two systems that you controlled instead of on the borders and I had to constantly change what systems to avoid to stop my colony ships from setting up colonies in enemy territory. I also wasn't able to use the resupply minister just for specific ships. I would order a fleet to take over a planet with a resupply depot but they would turn back before they got there even though the fleet wasn't under minister control.

By the way you can customize what your ministers do by giving your race custom AI files. But I haven't really looked at them enough to know whether or not I can fix these problems.