Hi Lord,
Thanks for the post. I can understand your concern, no one wants to criss-cross the screen as they play. The infocard placement is a difficult one. We've had countless iterations along every edge of the screen as well as a tooltip style. The location is not completely finalized at this stage, but I can share a bit of the background behind its current placement.

1) The Empire tree to the left usually requires a significant amount of space in larger games, particularily multiplayer games when you have more than one alliance -even if you have only 2 planets open.
As a side note, on screen resolutions less than your own, the infocard locates above the bottom UI, taking up considerably more space.

2) Basic/early game actions, like building ships, building modules, setting rally point, etc are much easier with the infocard located directly above (or in your case to the right) of these buttons.

3) There is a natural flow for purchasing units in the game. For example
a)selecting a ship in the action grid---> b)finding out how much it costs in the infocard ---> c)reviewing your resources.

4) Reviewing more detailed information is typically more important in non combat settings (ie. building, colonizing) vs in the heat of the battle. The immediate combat information(health,shields,antimatter,capital ship levels,#units,etc) is already represented in compact form in the empire tree.

5)Numerous other layout/design balancing issues.

Thanks for taking the time to details everything out with the screenshot
I'd like to hear some more feedback on this one. Anyone else have issues with this?
We will explore scrollbar variations further on in development.

Thanks!