Must have missed that reply from PShaw...  Thanks though.

I have noticed the same thing.  I have anomalies set to rare,  They are there to find, but you have to have a lot of faith about that.  For a long while in the start of the current game, the only ones I found were precursor anomalies.  My Ysengard Mercenary ship had nothing to do except find planets.  Somebody looked up the word "rare" in the dictionary and decided to take it seriously.  I approve of the change, but it was an extreme culture shock, and I may back off that setting in the future.  Still, it was good to see "rare" really mean "rare".

Now only if Abundant actually meant "abundant"

The Change to Influence growth is really a bit harsh...    Playing Krynn 151 turns in on a loose cluster map and none of my planets have enough influence to even make a territory...

Yes, the improvements are more powerful, but the net effect is still massively stunted influence growth...

How is anyone supposed to planet flip if the influence never grows even when playing an influence race?

One thought on the Planet specialization wheel, currently I very rarely use the Bureau of Labor but maybe as a bonus, since your adding more coercion, the building could reduce it somewhat. 

A Thalan trade ship arrived at one of my colonies before I even met them. I also don't think any of their ships saw my planet.

A pirate ship that followed one of my constructors attacked the starbase it created. It failed, but I don't recall seeing them do that. It was interesting.

1.9 SP game feedback part IV

• Continued core game feedback.  (General AI Behavior)

• Torian, placed a Solar Plant next to a capitol +2 on a Floodplain where a farm would have benefited the most from this location and a solar plant has very little benefit.  Instead placed a farm next to a factory in a different clump followed by a research building.

• Another faction built a farm, next to a marketplace, next to a factory & research building, next to a hotsprings, then built another market place on the otherside of the map as well as another research building on the otherside of the map, adjacency doesn't appear to have been the goal here.

• Had a 4th AI faction declare war, this time on the opposite side of the other AI's.  It didn't matter, however, they were also not ready for war and in fact they were 7th in military power next to my 6th in military power and I was #1 in power ranking where as they weren't even in the top 10.  

• Turn 145 I've still only met about 15%-20% of the factions and I have 3 x's the power ranking the next closest faction.

• AI is starting to build star bases but, at this point I'm just mopping them up.

• Observations...
• I was incorrect in my previous post about production being low, just needed to add some core buildings in the right places now building military much faster.
• Turn times starting to slow as I'm meeting factions and factions getting larger will continue to monitor, however, still at a decent rate 10-20 seconds per turn.

im not sure i like this

i play a starbase heavy game and the amount of micro that creates for constructor spam is rather annoying ive actually been thinking of increasing this number simply to reduce the amount of constructors you need to send out

From the bits I've played so far I do agree with those saying that influence changes appear too heavy - though in general I do like that it does take more effort to increase influence. Research on normal also a bit too fast, but to me it's kinda secondary as I could always set research rates slower.

Brad has suggested earlier that an administration resource will be introduced to limit the # of starbases for each faction.

Bravo for the return of Brad!! The changes and AI improvements in v1.90 are very positive. The nerfing of colony capital is great because it allows tall strategy to be viable, for example, for Yor.

One area that AI may need a lot of love is the build-order. The AI is building tons of low-yield buildings with return-on-investment 10x lower than the alternative. In 39 turns, I was able to beat the AI by more than 10x in planet production. 

AI Manu: 10; Research 22.1; Income: 1.8; Pop 7/16; Approval:100; influence: 53

Human Manu: 227; Research 47; Income: -6.7; Pop 32.5/30; Approval:64; influence: 69

There may be a relatively simple fix, see this post.

Hi,

This would certainly cut down on what has become the rather overwhelming task of optimising starbases but they do need to balance this against tech costs.

After a first iteration of 1.90 in which these became very low - much too cheap really - there's been another one (unless my file set up is faulty and the game is corrupted) in which they've gone the other way and (as I said in another thread)  after I got about 100 techs in a huge galaxy at genius level and normal tech cost, the cost of the most expensive tech of all Beyond Mortality, had already inflated to over 200k.

This is certainly doable with unlimited starbases or some reasonable cost for them since you can get 16 or 18 round your top research planets but otherwise would be incredibly hard and so going  for conquest  - or at least to take a very large number of juicy research  planets - would become forced if you wanted to play for a tech win. 

Correspondingly, the reduction in culture has mitigated very strongly against going for a culture win and, incidentally, somewhat reduced the effectiveness of the Benevolent ideology tree since "Enticing" previously a potential game changer is now rather less effective (You can arrange to snag minor races but harder to get planets of the major ones). 

And indeed the Builder line of the pragmatic tree will greatly reduce in value if you need far fewer constructors because you have far fewer bases.

The reduction in planet capital bonuses has also had an effect on the ideology trees since Malevolent with its early production bonuses is now relatively better than it was before.

Anyway, the point I'm making is that changes to one aspect of the game can affect balance in all sorts of ways and need to be thought about very carefully.

Any thoughts anybody,

Cheers,

Jon

You don't even have to go as far as to do a ROI table. Just fix two issues:

1) Shipyards. A new colony does not need a shipyard, when it is popcapped 5/5 and only has a basic factory and a research laboratory on it.

2) Upgrades. You do not build a Xeno Factory, when you can build a solar power plant. If you have adjacencies, you probably don't even do the upgrade first if you ahve to terraform a tile. 45 prod for +10% vs. 75 prod for 25% + adjacencies (at least three)

2b) Especially with the reduced production from colony capitals, you will possibly even prefer a farm in the above example.

In this picture (turn 25, normal) shows everything which wrong with AI build orders. I see a couple of better things to do, than the AI is doing here. It has been wasting 9 turns on this allready.

This is becoming a ceterum censeo of mine.

Could we get confirmation, that this is being looked at? Like soon? It would really put my mind at ease to see, that you are actually reaching for the low hanging fruit.

I picked the ideology trait for 3 constructors instead it gave me a packet ship. I double checked it happened. 

Wow, you weren't kidding about "dramatically improve startup times".  It takes well under half the time it used to.