I was just forced to quit playing my first game ever, playing as the Lumeris, sadly right before I was supposed to win it. One turn, I am sitting with a comfortable +500 dust surplus, a balanced navy, several strong heroes, and it was down to just me and the cravers. The next turn, I integrate a pesky minor race and all of a sudden I get absolutely destroyed by the overcolonization happiness penalty. My dust drops from +500 per turn to a devastating -400 per turn. over the course of just a few turns, my entire fleet is scrapped, all of my heroes unassigned (which made the problem even worse as I lost the governor bonuses), and the game starts systematically dismantling my entire infrastructure... putting every single planet I had on 3d printing didn't even come close to touching the deficit, and the only thing that kept me going even that long was the fact that it dismantled all of my science structures first. but within 8 turns it started dismantling happiness buildings and my -400 deficit plummeted to a -600 in a single turn due to my empire being in rebellion. The next turn it dismantled the rest of my happiness buildings and I just quit. I was just getting into the meat of the era II techs and I didn't have the tech that reduced over colonization penalties, but it would have taken 12 turns to research putting it waaay too late to pull out of my death spiral.

As far as I could see, there was no method to increase my income, there was no way to increase happiness enough, and there was no warning that the simple act of integrating a minor race would create an unrecoverable feedback loop.

Am I missing some economic function or happiness function? 

Is there any way to avoid the insanely massive penalties for unhappiness? 

I feel like the sudden 50% drop in ALL dust production for an unhappy empire is extremely harsh, especially as you get into the mid game  where the empires start to spread out, and the 75% dust reduction for rebellion made it simply unrecoverable. 

I had a similar situation where I ended up boosting the religious faction as the Cravers, causing all of my Militarist/Industrialist population to go into open revolt across all my systems. I bled out all my FIDSI and started rapidly losing population units. It does seem like a few approval-related maluses can totally torpedo a playthrough right now.

mezmorki wrote:

 Moreover, it sounded like you needed more money in the bank as a buffer.  If you have almost no money in the bank, and your income goes from +500 to -400, you have no strategic reserve to buy you time to correct the problem - you're instantly thrown the death spiral you describe.  Next time, keep a healthy surplus of money on hand for a rainy day :)

lol, I agree with ya here, and to be fair, I had been keeping a fairly sizable reserve... up until I went and upgraded my fleets xD 

I also agree that it should a balancing game in order to keep from draining your own economy, as that is what adds depth, however, I think the biggest issues here are balance issues...

1) The size of the penalty is too dang high, especially for the kind of damage it can do! There should definitely be some kind of economic penalty for unhappiness but going from a healthy economy straight to having half of your income taken away is too extreme. I propose that the economic penalty be dropped to 10 - 20% for unhappy and 30 - 40 % for rebellious. Most mid to late game empires will be able to take a hit like that for a short while without it being crippling/unrecoverable. In return, I would suggest ramping up the growth penalty. There is a reason why this dynamic is used across the 4x genre (see Civ), logically, unhappy populations don't grow, and in a strategy game like this, growth is ultimately key. This is  especially true in endless space, where most bonuses are applied by population point. The loss of growth is, in my humble opinion, a far better deterrent for a smart, strategic player to avoid over-stretching, and it is not completely unrecoverable when a player inadvertently triggers the penalty.

2) I think the unhappiness metric needs (and likely will) be fixed... The simplistic 5 tiers that currently exist: ecstatic, happy, content, unhappy, and rebellious work, but I feel that they could be maybe incremented better? Possibly putting degrees to happy/unhappy such as: "somewhat" or "very" (un)happy as you move one way or another along the bar? More specifically, I think that there should be certain benchmarks in happiness/unhappiness that should, at the very least, prompt a message to the player. A simple pop up that comes up along the right side that says something like "your people are growing restless" to let you know when your empire happiness has started to dip would be a lifesaver and could point to a governance issue that you may not have noticed until too late otherwise.

Thoughts?

mezmorki wrote:

The game needs feedback on when overcolonization (and also overpopulation within a system) start to kick into effect.  I agree it can be jarring.

An over-colonisation related quest would be a good warning to the player as well as maybe offering some opportunities to mitigate the effects of it.

The Dust costs and penalties are absurdly overpowered. I know the previous games suffered from endless Dust from mid-game onwards but this ridiculous overcompensation!

I had the same problem in this situation:

I had a perfect working solar system. I decided to discover more anomalies and i got a real bad one, so i cant do anything against the problems in this solar system now. In Endless Space 1 we dont have this problem, because you saw the anomalies directly (you dont have to discover them). The problem with overcolonisation and overpopulation you can balance very well (dont colonise to much planets and dont build system improvements). 

Its important to fix that to have a better game balance.

Freezingsun wrote:

I had the same problem in this situation:

I had a perfect working solar system. I decided to discover more anomalies and i got a real bad one, so i cant do anything against the problems in this solar system now. In Endless Space 1 we dont have this problem, because you saw the anomalies directly (you dont have to discover them). The problem with overcolonisation and overpopulation you can balance very well (dont colonise to much planets and dont build system improvements). 

Its important to fix that to have a better game balance.

You can discover the anomalies before colonizing with your explorer ships. There are new discoveries that pop up when you tech up later - but I believe those are all exclusively strategic resources that you get the tech for later on.

Simply put, the penalties for unhappiness are too high. Simply a numbers tweak, but one that should be in place immediately.

Or the unhappiness could be a bonus/amlus to happiness points... per turn.

So if you hit the expansion disaproval you have some turns to react before the penalties take effect.

Instead of recalculating the happiness value each turn, you would get a bonus/malus like with the influence with minor factions.

Now : happiness = 75 -> expand -> happiness = 50

Instead you could have : happiness = 75 -> expand -> -1 happiness per turn down to a minimum of 50 (so you have 25 turns before the penalty takes effect)