I micro-manage everything, down to 0.1 increments. Yes, it is excessive.
All queues are currently lossy (all excess production is lost). Paul's intent was that they should become carry-1, which means they carry over up to (but not including) the next queue item's cost, so you could complete 1.999 things per turn, per queue. (Actually, Paul's intent was that queues should have been carry-1 since Alpha, and he was repeatedly surprised in more than one dev stream that they weren't.) This necessarily omits technology research, which has no queue to specify a "next" item.
My strategy is to maximize production with zero loss. That means every turn, for every queue, I binary-search by pixel click-hell for the optimal setting that exactly finishes all this-turn-completable items, with all excess soaked off onto things that cannot be completed this turn. This means manually changing (potentially) every planet's wheel, every turn, independently of each other. So the global production settings and automatic upgrade options mean absolutely nothing to me; I never use them, and I'd rather not play at all than play by using them. (ahem)
I can envision (and have suggested) ways in which this could be automated, but I somewhat suspect that they won't be implemented because it's the optimal strategy, and therefore the devs will have incentive to not make it auto-pilot-easy for everybody. I fully expect that any player using this strategy would gradually out-produce any Turn-happy player by 1-3% per turn over the duration of the game, which probably just wins. That's why I do it. An uber-AI might do this, but that almost surely embeds NP-complete subproblems, esp. bin-packing, and maybe 3-sat(isfiability) and TSP (traveling salesman).
If queues were carry-1, then you'd still have to sweep through and not waste your excess tech research, but you could almost ignore all other planets' manuf queues. That would reduce the burden substantially. If we also get a 2-item tech queue, that could reduce the per-turn burden to zero. Then the Turn-happy speed player would be almost as waste-free as the diligent manager. (However, a micro-manager would still benefit by consistently completing things 1 turn sooner, and thus milking maybe a few% advantage in accumulated turns-of-effect, i.e. the total area under the histogram of her bonuses-per-turn would be marginally greater. Considering only tech, if I consistently finish techs 1 turn sooner than you, by AoW that might mean I get Planetary Invasion 6 turns before you do. Ugh -- I think I just proved that I must still micro-manage --)
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