The bulk upgrade feature has been very useful, especially when the intention is to give a maximum boost to one type of infrastructure and/or there are many stars within an empire. However, there are two conditions that I find it is not designed to accommodate. Perhaps with a little tweaking it could be even more useful.
Condition #1: building the most infrastructure of either type
Sometimes I simply want to keep buying whatever is cheapest to build, to get the most for my credits. I propose adding more options to the drop-down menu of infrastructures that can be upgraded on the Bulk Infrastructure Upgrade controls. The cases wherein science would be among them are so rare that it can be excluded to maintain ease and simplicity of design. Given that there are often upgrade options of equal cost among economy and industry, these two would need to be prioritized.
That said, I would love to see “Economy, Industry” and “Industry, Economy” added to the menu. Performing a bulk upgrade with these options would purchase in sequence whatever is cheapest among the two of them, with the first type listed being the one that will be purchased when there are options of equal cost for both.
Condition #2: not building infrastructure on stars at risk of being captured
No one wants to build infrastructure on stars only to have them fall into enemy hands, so when one is under attack the bulk upgrade feature cannot be used without worry of wasting credits and helping the attacker. To circumvent this limitation of the feature players could be able to deselect stars from being included in any bulk upgrade. Here’s how I envision that working:
On the Galaxy controls, the colored shapes in the first column could be switches that a player can click to turn on or off. The state of each switch could be indicated by changing the shape from solid to hollow, like they appear around stars or to the left of players’ names on the leaderboard, with the inside of the hollow shapes being black. Controls could be added to the right of Show All Stars, below the bulk upgrade button, to select or deselect all stars for bulk upgrades.
On the individual controls for each star, another switch could be added somewhere in the Infrastructure section.
On the map, deselected stars could have a black dot in the center as an indicator.