[Puke]

for moving population, there are a couple things. some people just dont do it. other people trust the AI minister for population transports and colonization. if you want to do it all your self (manage different races for breathing different atmospheres and such) then it helps to give long orders rather than changing the ships order on each leg of the trip. tell it to go somewhere, pickup, go somewhere else, dropoff. then, you can scroll through the ship list each turn and look for ships without orders, and give them somewhere to go.

for fleets, NAME them something meaningful, and only use a couple fleets per front. station the fleet at a training planet or at a rally point, and send new builds there as soon as they roll out of the factory. once a ship gets to the rally point, you know its supposed to be in the fleet. once the fleet is big enough, send it on its way.

if you want to manage production yards better without wondering which system is supposed to be supporting which front, try renaming your spaceyards and construction bases in a similar manner as your fleets. that way they will all sort out in the construction list and you can have them build whatever is needed on their front without wondering where they are and how close they are to the appropriate fleet.

i find the hardest part is keeping tract of other human players, and remembering who you had made which deals with. especially when two empires in different games use the same race picture and shipset. for this, there is no help that i have found.

back in the VGA Planets days, we used to keep wall-chart printouts of the galaxy map and stick pins in it here and there, as well as a notepad of friendly-codes for each game / empire / ally. you think SE4 is hard to keep track of!