The Micromanagement issues depend a lot on your game setup / strategy IMO.
TL;DR: Don't try a wide empire strategy (such as devouring swarms, Assimilators, Exterminators etc.) if you don't want a lot of Micro.
In my first campaign I played a Megacorp (fan. xenophile, focusing on Trade, diplomacy etc.. worked actually really well). I replaced the "sector" section in the Outliner with "planets" and for me the Micro was absolutely fine. I had a dozen planets or so to manage, and frankly didn't quite get what all these Micromanagement complaints were all about..
To me making conscious decisions on what to build, or whether or not to upgrade something if it then needs special resources = good micro
Mindlessly clicking stuff (such as upgrading mines on planet tiles or setting up 20 tiles in a formulaic way like all/mostly mines) = bad micro
In my second campaign I tried a Devouring Swarm Hivemind. I found the Micro a bit annoying even in the beginning tbh.
Main reasons being:
- Maintenance drone job Micro
- Hunter-seeker drone job Micro after taking planets
- Too many planets to manage in mid/late game.
Maintenance drone jobs:
I spend a few minutes in the beginning looking at worker outputs and what the different jobs do, and soon realized that having too many maintenance drones instead of miners, farmers, tech drones etc. is really bad. Maintenance drones produce only amenities. High amenities increase pop resource production (up to 20%), while low amenities reduce production, but the difference this makes is nowhere near what you get when working actual resource production jobs. So what I did from the start was constantly adjusting the maintenance drone slots manually, which is the kind of Micro that to me feels bad (suggestion: give the maintenance drone job a low priority if amenities are positive, and high(er) priority if they are negative).
Making sure that enough maintenance drone jobs are available is IMO completely fine for Micro.
Checking every planet every few years and tediously adjusting drone job slots is not however (let me know if I miss something obvious, but typically when I add 5 maintenance drone jobs with a building, I might only want to work 1-2 and not all 5..)
Hunter-seeker drone jobs:
Naturally when taking planets by force there is low stability on the planet. That's what the Hunter-seeker drones are for. For some bizarre reason, they have a really low job priority however, even when instability is at 100%.. So guess what I do, closing every other job (+ possibly resettling a few pops from other planets) until finally the Hunter jobs are filled.
Of course this also means that you'll have to re-visit that same planet later on to re-open the jobs you deactivated previously.
Too many planets:
Normally this is where sectors come in. At some point I do no longer care that much about efficiency, and would previously just drop planets to sectors and give it enough resources to operate - maybe occasionally doing a check if the AI build stuff I consider important. It's no-where perfect but worked well enough.
Now with the new sector system, for some reason sectors are really tiny. As I had 60 planets at some point I actually counted my sectors and found that for the 60 planets I had 35 sectors (!) Sorry but this is way too many and not helpful. Instead of managing 60 planets I would now have to manage 35 sectors (selecting settings, allocating resources etc.) and in the end probably still have to do some micro on the actual planets. I don't see the point in that..
I abandoned that particular game to start a new one (again with Tall play stile - I consider 10-15 planets still tall, even if you exceed your admin cap quite a bit)
