Automation and Its Problems
Automation can give the player the option to better determine what he wants to engage with. Distant Worlds 1 and 2 have the ability to actually automate everything, from diplomacy, economics to warfare. Sadly this comes with some problems.
It gives the developer an excuse to implement extremely overly complex systems and disregard criticism with "If you don't like it just automate it!". Bad gameplay features get just automated by the player and will start to rot away. If a feature is worth to be automated maybe it should always be automated because it's not engaging the player in a good way.
If a player thinks: "I wish I could automate this in some way". This usually means the player sees the interaction as work of labor. This is bad because games should be fun not labor. Players will say things like, its tedious consume too much time, I feel I have to do the work because its required. In other games we would call such an interaction grindy.
"You have to do the 10 grindy quests, so you can finally do the one quest that is fun."
Personally when first playing Distant Worlds 1 I was so overwhelmed of what I have to do, that after some time I simply partially-automated things because I had the feeling of "I have no idea what to do right, how do I do this or that? What is a good ship to build now?" And I really didn't want to watch an hour-long YouTube tutorial. (Keep in mind, most people don't want to watch an hour-long YouTube video or want to read 50 pages of documentation)
This needs to be refactored into another chapter because we are overwhelming the reader with the idea of automation and complexity of mechanics. While they relate we can safely split them and just link to it.
"Mhh so you are saying that games need to be dumb down because we cannot implement complex and interesting game mechanics?" NO! This is not the conclusion to make. Complex mechanics can be created, but they need to be introduced in a layered manner. Do not overwhelm the player with text and options. Hide these options and give the player the option to say if he wants to see 3 general options or 10 specific ones. It's better to say in the beginning to you want to focus on warfare, economics or diplomacy than do you want to focus on commodity production, industry goods production, swarm warfare, psyops-focus diplomacy, etc.
People are not dumb, we don't need to spoon-feed them all the time. But in the beginning it's a good way to introduce them to features :)
Summary
In short, if you get the feeling of "this should be automated" It's probably not a fun mechanic in the first place for the player to engage with. Giving the player 10 more interactions that they have to engage with does not mean they are 10 times more fun than when he would just have to engage with one.