Yeah, it's a certain type of trap. At first it is something to do and some near term goal that exist there. Later when you complete everything in a turn it just becomes exercise of going through a list of actions repeated over half-a-dozen to dozens systems. Maybe games should offer some tools for this, like templates what to build and what ratios and so on. You could automatically set one of these or have custom one made for those needing more special actions.
A simple "inherit from parent" checkbox for each settings dialog?
So you adjust all the settings for each, say, city in the first few rounds; then, when you have several countries, you click that box in each of the cities and from then on set it just for each country; later, click it in each country and just set for whole planets. If later you want to micromanage some specific city or country, just uncheck the box only for that one, and let all the other cities in the country / countries on the planet keep following the settings of their parent level.
That's for geographical entities. But perhaps something similar could be set by inventing hierarchical levels for more abstract concepts like technological / economic / military / research strategies. Or maybe it doesn't even need to be invented; maybe they are already bundled together in sub- and sub-sub-concepts in some games?
I don't know, I haven't played any games of this kind for... Since Civ 1 or 2, maybe mid-nineties. This came to mind because I've been thinking about doing something like this in a (totally unrelated) piece of software I'm designing in my head.
