The classic way of give orders to factories is to select them or use a control group (1 etc. ) and queue up build orders. Some games allow you to set rally points for the factories on the map. This works fine for most games, however with the scale of PA, I was wondering why can't we just drag and drop build orders of unis directly on the planet? Factories should then spam the units you ordered and send them to the location. You don't have to find the factory that can produce unit x or use control groups. It's not AI automation that takes away choices from the player, but rather a faster way of queuing up units.
edit: For sure, this would fall into powerful UI territory, which Uber supports. If this particular feature doesn't make it I'm positive a modder will add it in.
The problem is that you need to know where the units are build. If you just tell the game: "Build a tank and send it there" the game might end up using your only vehicle factory on the other side of the planet and send the tank across enemy territory to reach it's destination. @veta: What has the egg to do with this?
I personally don't see that as a problem. You can't have the computer to do everything for you. Also, I don't think you're going to be macro managing(on the interplanetary level) using a planet that has enemies on it. If you're smart, you'd use a Macro Management UI on the interplanetary scale for planets that you have total control over. A smart player would never send bulk orders to a place where things can easily get out of hand. Man. I wish Micro and Macro didn't both start with M... because then you could have an MMUI and another one.. perhaps... µMUI. They'd work in a way that is always readily accessible, meaning a simple one button hotkey could switch between the Macro(M) Management UI and the Micro(µ) Management UI. Macro would allow you to select a planet, give you a list of the different types of factories and how many of each factory on that planet, then the user could choose to build units from a specific factory, or build units from all factories at once. Oh yeah, and it would allow you to choose the rally points The Micro UI would be basically what the UI is now.