[douglas]

The AI ministers are generally pathetic and definitely not trustworthy. The only minister I would ever consider turning on is the population transport minister, and then only if I don't have multiple breather types in my empire.

There are quite a number of tricks you can use to reduce micromanagement, however. As mentioned before, there is a "Goto" button on the log screen that will take you directly to the planet, sector, ship, research screen, intelligence screen, or whatever that is relevant to the currently selected log entry. This allows easy location of new colonies that need to be filled up with facilities, newly converted atmospheres that need the converter scrapped and the new space filled, newly crew insurrected ships, fleets that just fought major battles, etc.

There is a repeat orders command that is very useful for certain things. Setting a planet to launch mines on repeat will make it automatically launch any mines you ever build there. You can set a population transport to endlessly load population from a homeworld and drop it somewhere else. If you're into fighters, you can repeat launch fighters, order them all to a particular location in system, and have a carrier on repeat orders to pick them up and take them to a central location.

Waypoints are essential to managing any truly large empire in a reasonable amount of time. Press alt+number and click to set a waypoint. You can then press ctrl+number to send the currently selected ship or fleet to that waypoint. You can set space yards to automatically send any ships they build to a particular waypoint, which is great for collecting all your ships at a central location, usually a training center, before sending them to the front. If you move a waypoint (just set a new one with the same number as the old), any ships already going there will automatically change course to the new location. Ships already at the waypoint will have already cleared the order, but they're all in one place already so it's easy to find them and deal with it. Waypoints can also be managed from a subscreen of the Empire Status (F11) screen.

Pressing the space bar takes you to the next ship/mobile unit stack that doesn't have orders, great for making sure you don't have anything sitting idle that shouldn't be. You can change some settings about how this behaves in empire options. I usually set it to skip ships in fleets because I manage those through the ships screen (F6), and often have large fleets sitting around training or guarding warp points, which would be looped through once for every ship in the fleet if I didn't have that option on.

In the Planets (F4), Colonies (F5), Ships (F6), and Construction (F7) screens, you can sort by any column by clicking on the top of that column. Each sort preserves the previous ordering where possible, so you can sort by size and by minerals value within size by clicking first on minerals value and then on size. Sorting by the picture in planets and colonies sorts by size, largest at the bottom. Sorting by item under construction in the construction screen puts all idle construction queues at the top. Clicking on any item in these lists takes you to that item; for construction queues, it takes you to the construction queue screen, not the place where it's located. You can add items to many queues at once by shift-clicking on a number of queues and then clicking the Multi-Add button.

If you're ever looking for a particular planet or system and don't have a convenient goto button for some reason, right-clicking on the galaxy map brings up a screen that includes a Goto System button that brings up an alphabetical list.

If you have a default build order for new colonies of a particular type and size and are getting tired of all the clicking to set it up every time, you can store it as a premade queue. Set it up once on a new planet and click the Fill Queue button. Click to add a new type, name the type, and click ok. From then on, you can add that exact sequence of items to any construction queue that has the capability to build them all by clicking the Fill Queue button and selecting the appropriate type. This is particularly useful for setting up Ringworlds and Sphereworlds to fill up their entire facility space, but be careful not to select those queues for smaller planets - you'll get one error message you have to click ok on for every facility in the queue beyond what the planet has room for.