Playing with Hissho gave me an idea how to fix the totally broken Lumeris affinity "Planet Brokers".

The main problem is that you almost never trade outposts.

A simple way to fix it is this:
(read all before you decide it is overpowered as it is not)

1. Each outpost costs Lumeris a fixed price which would not increase as it does now (could be 100 Dust, but would need to see from gameplay where that number should land).
2. You can disable food transfer from a home system so that outpost grows only from food it generates.
3. Lumeris need to pay the increased dust price to convert the outpost into a colony (the price would be just like now with buying outposts)
4. Lumeris can trade an outpost (one with fully generated food ready to be turned into a colony would be worth more)
5. After selling an outpost the new owner doesn't need to pay dust to transfer it into a colony (even if they are Lumeris, they already payed for it when buying)
6. The sold system starts with 1 Lumeris (regardless of who is buying).

Before you say that Lumeris will spam the galaxy with outposts ask yourself if that is a problem?

If you want to colonize a system that has a Lumeris outpost you can always close in with your fleet and remove it if you want to.

Would be also good to have a diplomatic action requesting to remove an outpost.

This change allows Lumeris to have a bigger amount of planets to broker with and what is more important give the possibility to keep an outpost as just an outpost without turning it into a colony just waiting for the right buyer.

We could go with this rule a little further and allow each faction to create outposts with colony ships but decide if they should be turned into a colony or left as they are (just an outpost generating resources but needing dust). Maybe even turning off the food deliver option should be available to all (for sure it would stop when the outpost would reach 300 food).

This introduces some more interesting mechanics into the game where you can in a way "claim" a system by having an outpost there but not converting it into a colony so that approval stays the same. There would be conflicts over those outposts and maybe it would be possible to have an outposts on each planet as a single player so that resources from all planets could be harvested.

What do you think about this?

It shouldn't be hard to implement in the game and would solve the planet brokers issue at least in some way.

Wasn't aware this was suggested.

I had an idea about "claiming" a system that was similar to this but didn't use the outposts.

The idea behing Lumeris being the first population on that sold planet is that they were the ones setting up the outpost and are probably on the planet.

And this may be a bonus for a player to get some of this dust generating population.

It just made sense to do it this way but I don't see any problem in making them move out and the buying faction moving in with their own.

Intriguing idea.  Thematic, not too mechanically distant from the current game...

Would be nice as Horatio too.  I don't have to hunt Lumeris down if I can just buy their outpost and get a lumeris pop as a bonus!

We like this idea. We won't have the time to try it out in the balance mod though, and it might be too gameplay altering to actually be pushed at large. But I can confirm that you should be able to mod this using the new outpost actions we created for the Hisshos.

Shameless self-promotion but I already implemented most of what the OP lists in my mod a while ago (in some way or another), the only thing that can't be modded is the ability to disable food transfer, afaik it will ALWAYS request food if the system is in range of automated ships (eg not in free move range if you don't have the free move tech) and there is no option to disable food transfer completely.

Kuma wrote:

Shameless self-promotion but I already implemented most of what the OP lists in my mod a while ago (in some way or another), the only thing that can't be modded is the ability to disable food transfer, afaik it will ALWAYS request food if the system is in range of automated ships (eg not in free move range if you don't have the free move tech) and there is no option to disable food transfer completely.

You can disable food transfer with this modifier
<Modifier TargetProperty="NetSystemOutpostMigrationGrowthMultiplier" Operation="Force" Value="0"  Path="ClassEmpire/ClassColonizedStarSystem/ClassOutpostMigrationFlux" TooltipHidden="true"/>

IceGremlin wrote:

The thing about Planet Brokers is with this change, it's still restricted to early game.

I think this is okay. You unlock new planets to colonize via techs for a good chunk of the game. After that, Lumeris trade company rules are what should start to define the faction (if the problems with trade were resolved).