[jRides]

I would prefer at least some control over the planets. I would agree with the idea put forward to scale it up into zones. Either the player selects or the planet defines the zones. These zones then increase in effectiveness with population and tech - limited by the amount your willing to spend on planetary improvement.

Besides the staples like Agricultural, Commercial, Industrial, Mining and Research you could get more defined with zones like Shipyards, System Capitals, Religious Centres, Military Bases and so on.

As you research and unlock new building types, they are just added to a zone as a bonus as it builds up increasing the output of the zone with multipliers. Refinement could come by allowing you to focus specific zones - like a research zone into a military research complex giving bonuses to weapons research or adding second slipway to a shipyard (can now build two ships of the same type at the same time and ofc doubles its resource use).

You could get quite deep into it, optional choices like amount of focus a specific zone gets: percentage of improvement budget, percentage of workforce assigned etc. if you wanted to change it from your empires default.

As to the resources - again I agree that SE's three resources worked well, it would be nice to see a few more maybe as a second tier in that they are rare and would only be used in such things as trade, luxuries or some weird weaponry type. It would mean systems/planet abundant in this rarer tier of resource might become more desirable, or research focus into better extraction/refinement of these resources an option, just not a required one.