auto placing structures

I usually place them manually, I gotta try the auto out and see what it works like.

hold down the alt key for a lot of extra info, including attack and ability ranges. also when hovering over a ship ability, you will also see the range.

Personally it just depends on what's going on in the game and what I'm doing. If I just need to toss a lab down when I'm zoomed out or doing something else, I'll toggle it on (K key), hit the lab button, then turn it back off.

I use it frequently. It's a handy feature that saves me time. The only situations where I don't use the auto-placement feature is when I want to place a missile turret or when I want to place a repair station.

The only negative aspect to using this feature is that structures may not be placed in ideal locations. Simply, a turret could be placed near a phase lane that leads to another planet you own... or a bunch of structures will be placed on the side of the planet where enemies will come from.

yeah i have noticed the structures are clumped usually, which sometimes is good and sometimes not. i played a game last night with auto place on the whole time and while the logistics structures were primarily in small groups the tactical ones were placed appropriately near the clumps. but when they are placed near a phase lane that leads to one of my planets is when i get annoyed.

I typically use auto-place for civilian structures and manual-place for tactical structures. Sometimes it puts the civilian structures in vulnerable places, but I'm willing to accept that inefficency since it's so much faster to use auto-place and the civilian structures are not so crushingly important that losing a few breaks me. On the other hand, I do tend to put my labs in the not-on-the-front-lines part of my empire.

hm, idea:

what about another toggle for autoplacement? one for "autplace nothing", one for "autoplace asteroids" (which is now in the options somewhere), "autoplace logistics strucutures" and "autoplace all" ( i.e. including tactical structures). in a lot of cases, position of logistics stuff is not so important, but I want to control layout of my defenses basically always.

what do you think?

that sounds like a great idea! one more option to toggle...lol.
maybe i should just slow down a little and place that defense structure, cause really what else am i doin besides cycling thru the research menu and my colonies to see what i can build.