Aitarus wrote:

One clear issue is that Riftborn should have inverted pop slots so they gain more slots on sterile. This could be accomplished by just adding to sterile and subtracting from fertile on the Biophobic trait.

This is probably a good call. 

I think the idea is that Riftborn don't have terribly high populations, as the industry cost for new pops is supposed to make building a great many of them offputting. In principle, this would make specialised lava/ice worlds more appealing. In practice, minor pops are quite happy living on sterile worlds in their empire, and building Riftborn pops in a high industry system and shipping them out works fine.

(I still find it strange that non-Riftborn pops enjoy Sterile worlds in a Riftborn empire, but hate them in a non-Riftborn empire.)

Reducing food and population growth in general would benefit lower population worlds, by the way: it's no good having a Terran planet you can't fill. Given that we know food is being looked at, I'd encourage anyone worried about how powerful Tier 0 worlds are due to their population sizes to wait and see what lower growth does to the balance. I expect that it moves even more toward the idea you terraform your core, high population worlds - while leaving empty, frontier worlds until they have a population large enough to make it worth it.

Biophobic as a faction trait caused me a lot of confusion. "Oh, so my Riftborn like lava worlds, so I guess I should put these Kalgeros onto these Savannah planets. Wait, they hate it?!"

Pointing it to major population is an elegant solution, Aitarus.

I do not think that new player friendliness should be cause for concern with an 'advanced' faction like Riftborn, and I may be wrong, but simply explaining that 'you prefer sterile worlds and can have more pops there' should not be a stretch.

It should be possible to point Biophobic directly at major population, I will look at that for my coming politics mod.

I suppose the 'new player' aspect is an issue. I don't know about physical space; I assumed the 'space' issue on planets was just related to physical infrastructure needed to provide places to live i.e. habitable areas. One assumes the Riftborn would find more space habitable than non-Riftborn, given their rather unique composition.

Kuma wrote:

I do agree the Biophobic trait should be a racial trait though (maybe even added to more races too, like Epistis and Deuvians), it would at least make managing unhappiness with RB empires a bit of a problem, as opposed to the non-issue it currently is.

It would be interesting to dump all your minor-pops on those horrible fertile worlds!

An idea does exist for this.

Dragar wrote:

Aitarus wrote:

One clear issue is that Riftborn should have inverted pop slots so they gain more slots on sterile. This could be accomplished by just adding to sterile and subtracting from fertile on the Biophobic trait.

This is probably a good call. 

I think the idea is that Riftborn don't have terribly high populations, as the industry cost for new pops is supposed to make building a great many of them offputting. In principle, this would make specialised lava/ice worlds more appealing. In practice, minor pops are quite happy living on sterile worlds in their empire, and building Riftborn pops in a high industry system and shipping them out works fine.

(I still find it strange that non-Riftborn pops enjoy Sterile worlds in a Riftborn empire, but hate them in a non-Riftborn empire.)

Reducing food and population growth in general would benefit lower population worlds, by the way: it's no good having a Terran planet you can't fill. Given that we know food is being looked at, I'd encourage anyone worried about how powerful Tier 0 worlds are due to their population sizes to wait and see what lower growth does.

I may like the RB the most out of all the ES2 races, yet I don't think Amplitude devs should go for this. Imho, all Empires should get the same amount of pops (roughly and bar Vods) on the same type of planets, firstly, because it would be hard to explain that to new players, it's already pretty confusing that the tree only allows you to terraform in a reversed way, but it also feels unnatural, RB like sterile planets the most but for example, in Lava and Toxic planets it's not like they have more space to put their robotic shells than the rest of the Races. Also it wouldn't adress the issue of Lava being worse than Ash for other races.

I do agree the Biophobic trait should be a racial trait though (maybe even added to more races too, like Epistis and Deuvians), it would at least make managing unhappiness with RB empires a bit of a problem, as opposed to the non-issue it currently is.

Hey, there. Today I wanted to make a lenghty post regarding the balance of the different planets, including their yields and their modifiers.

First of all, if you're a regular player, you probably noticed how most planets are inferior regarding their yields in late game to Tier 0 planets, aka Atoll, Ocean, Terran and Forest. That comes from a simple thing : A vast majority of System improvements and Governor skills take effect on the number of population, and because Tier 0 planets have the most population slots (cf 1st figure) they end up being superior in all FIDSI and Happiness production.

Number of population slots depending on planet type and size

Now, you could retort this isn't so bad and that it's fine to have the T0 planets be the end-game goal of Terraformation, but the problem with this is that it conflicts with 2 philosophies of the game:

• Firstly, colonizing higher tiers of planet ends up being less rewarding than going for the lower tier from the get go, because Terraformation is costly and timely, despite requiring higher level techs and costing more resources.
• Secondly, out of the 8 Races (9 with the DLC, now), 3 of them do not wish to terraform to tier 0 or simply can't : Vodyanis simply can't terraform at all, Riftborns cannot terraform towards tier 0 but instead, go towards tier 4 (which is worse than tier 3 and 2 by all means, cf figure 2), and finally, Cravers have a playstyle that forces you to play wide and not bother with terraformation.

In the above calc (link here if you want to take a look at how I calculate those), I put all the improvements scaling on population (as well as most of the additive bonus) for industry and Food (Dust, Science and Influence aren't complete because I only wanted to make a point about Ash/Lava/Desert). The orange column represents the industry output at max population. It is clear that Desert is better than Ash at Industry, which in turn is better than Lava, this being counter intuitive and conflicting with the seemingly "higher tier is more specialized" philosophy of the game. The differences can become even worse if you manage to stack Void stones in your system upgrades (+4 industry/pop) and with the Governor skills which are not counted there.

They become awful when you factor in the biofuel upgrade which lets you convert all your food surplus to industry, making Atoll even better at Industry than all the Hot planets right now (although, a food rework is in the works so this last point might get fixed soon™).

Then, I would like to talk about Gas planets. Currently, Gas planets get the least amount of population slots and do not have the Sterile or the Temperature tags (Temperate/Cold/Hot). In return, they get high FIDSI outputs, once again, the philosophy here being they're the most specialized so they should get the best outputs in limited areas. On the other hand, this causes 2 issues :

• First of all, since most upgrades stack with population slots and on Temperature/Fertility tags, by the time you get to the point where you can colonize those, you'll probably don't care too much because of the sheer cost of colonizing them, and because they don't give back a huge return on investment.
• Secondly, since Vodyanis do not care about population capacities, they can fill those with as many as 9 populations, meaning they get a huge advantage for those compared to the other races, but also get huge penalties to happiness because of the -5 per pop on them.

Finally, I would like to propose some changes to fix most of those issues 

1. Add the Sterile tag to gas planets, as well as the Temperature tags. I know they used to have them but were changed to Gas ages ago. Not only would this allievate the low population problems on Gas planets by letting us build the improvements that give +1 on Sterile, it would also help them benefit from most system improvements. It also makes no sense that they do not get those tags as they are indeed sterile and Hot/Cold (heck, some are even called "Gas Hot" and "Gas Cold"), and this does not seem to cause any GUI issue (cf my mod that put the tags back).
2. Add more population slots to higher tiers to make them more competitive with the rest. It would even out most planets and fix the issue of Desert being better than Ash and Lava. There's already a drawback to colonizing those and that's negative Happiness, I don't see why they should also get half or a third as many population slots as the tier 0.
   It also wouldn't affect the early game dynamics at all, because you wouldn't be changing the FIDSI outputs to rebalance them. Happiness is also very easy to manage because the "specialized" planets have very low population slots so they don't give you as much unhappiness compared to when Happiness was a flat value.
   Finally, you could rebalance some of the most random factions (read: Vods) by lowering the higher tiers of planets a little bit, to compensate for the increase of max output due to the population slots.
3. If you don't want to do the above change, alternatively, you could rebalance the outputs even more but it would in turn, affect the early game dynamics, make Vodyanis even more random and would be extremely hard to balance correctly, so I don't think this is a wise choice at all.
4. Allow us to reverse terraform (or reverse-reverse terraform for RB) but at an increased cost when going in the direction unfavored by the faction, allowing people to go towards the specalized planets after giving them more incentive. I think having the tier 0 planets being the absolute best no matter what really reduces the choices we have to make, making it really dull.

So this is it, I hope I made my points clear enough to highlight the glarring issues with the planet balance. I don't think my solutions are perfect but they would go a long way to rebalance the planets (which didn't get much love since their latest rebalancing), and I would like to start a discussion to hopefully help the devs make them a bit more balanced, in order to broaden up the choices players have to make while also making it feel more natural.

I actually do not take much issue with the current working of the system. It makes sense to me that harsher planets are less habitable and thus attract both approval maluses and lower population, but perhaps the maths is not yet ideal. The fact that some of the temperature based planets are so extreme, like cold planets with 0 base industry, can be a disproportionately detrimental effect on anyone who starts near lots of cold systems compared to someone who starts with many hot. Evening out the yields while retaining focus may be merited.

Terraformation may cost too much for how consequential it is, and there are situations where a certain tag combination like Jungle for Fertile/Hot and Boreal for Fertile/Cold exceeds the higher tier planets like Terran et al due to retaining gains from Cold/Hot improvements. This I'd say is actually an elegant example of how terraformation gameplay might look if some of the lower tier sterile planets were worth retaining also, so there may be some room for that.

Perhaps the planet specialisations could be further tuned toward hot, cold and sterile tags so that there is a viable strategy to produce high base yield worlds if you can afford the approval cost? That said, I still think the ideal worlds overall should be Tier 0.

One clear issue is that Riftborn should have inverted pop slots so they gain more slots on sterile. This could be accomplished by just adding to sterile and subtracting from fertile on the Biophobic trait.

Super Biofuel should just have its conversion reduced to 50 or at max 75% conversion. There is no other conversion in game that exceeds 75, and that is for the faction specific ones. To have one that allows a 1:1 converson into the highest value FIDSI is way out of balance.

I really think one of the things that should occur is that Planet Types should have less penalty to happiness for living on them (because -8 PER POP is beyond brutal, it's enough to negate anything else you do!) Maximum penalty to happiness per population should be -4, and all prior penalties should be halved (rounded up, so -4, -3, -2, -1) Lava, Toxic, and Barren planets could almost be catagorized as Cruel and Unusual Punishment if you are playing Shipbound because you have no way to change how many people live there, so you'll be sitting on minimum of -32, and that's assuming you don't upgrade your system (which, let's be real, you will)

Beyond that, I think another beneficial change would be to change the Sterile Planet Population Increase (whose name escapes me) to also affect Tier 3 and 4 planets. This gives them some ability to compete with Tier 0 (though not entirely solving the issue it at least gives you some bonus incentive to remain in these otherwise wasteful states)

Keep in mind I was lazy and only the Food/Industry outputs are accurate, but yeah, the outputs start to get more even on Huge planets, problem is, those are the rarest and my calculations don't take into account hero skills, luxury system upgrades nor whatever depot you have on the planet (which mostly scale with population once again).

Also I agree about unlocking terraforming (cf my 4th point), but I still like how it's tied to the lore, like how RB would rather sterelize everything. I think they should keep that while also allowing us other options, for example by increasing the cost in the wrong direction of the terraformation tree. As it is now there's not much thinking involved.