Mercenary enclaves needs an update/QoL fix
Recently completed a 4.3 megacorp run with naval contractors/private military companies/letter of the marque, and although it felt a little bit weak, what bothered me the most is how inconvenient it was to play.
First, the UI needs to be improved. This is especially apparent with the issue of upgrading your mercenary capacity and providing them with tech. Every button click on that mercenary menu pauses the game, and for some reason the options are greyed out for half a second before finally becoming interactable again. Combined with the fact that the current mercenary interface is needlessly layered, I really do not understand why it was designed this way as it seems to just make interactions with mercenaries a complete chore, especially if you have 5+ enclaves that you need to get through every 10~ years to upgrade them. Just put everything on the initial menu: hire fleet, hire ground troops, purchase logistics service, buy mercenary starbase building, provide resources, provide technology, recall fleet. That's literally it.
Second, fleet contracts should automatically renew unless there is a lack of energy credits. After a contract ends, you need to interact with the aforementioned UI again, and when you rehire your fleets (even on the same tick that the contract ends), they have already been routed by the AI to return to the mercenary base. If I previously had my mercenary fleet following my main fleet of titans/battleships/whatever, I now have to go back into system view and re-follow that fleet. If there was an option to just automatically renew the contract WITHOUT rerouting the mercenary fleet during that single tick its not under your control, that would be wonderful.
Third, mercenary commanders needs to be locked into selecting the admiral leader specialization. I have so many mercenary fleets with commanders with the strategists specialization that are just earning absolutely useless traits.
There's other minor things too, such as how the hiring of mercenaries are still done in energy credits and not trade when 4.3 was supposed to solidify trade as the 'currency' of Stellaris. Would also appreciate a mercenary ship designer (sort of like the fed fleet designer or the GDF designer). But these are more or less optional, please just fix the UI, contract renewal process and the admiral specializations.