I found myself running into two conceptual weaknesses with the fame star system and want to lay out some ideas how that could be addressed:

1. Several of the fame stars are earned in pretty similar fashion and through a fairly similar playstyle. The actions to earn industry, agriculture, science - and partly also influence, trade, and expansion - are quite similar. Build a combination of quarters and infrastructures. Of course, there are wrinkles here and there. Food and industry are not available in all tiles, so that might nudge you one way or another, at least at the beggining. While native science and trade tile yileds are so rare that their placement doesn't matter as much. And there are no dedicated influence quarters. Influence generation is driven more by infrastructures and emblematic quarters. But still, it's basically all "build" stuff that synergises and feels pretty similar.

2. The second issue is that I feel there are too few trade-offs for earning fame stars. Everything you build under the above categories is useful for engine-building in some way. Some things more than others and there is certainly lots of min-maxing to be done but gameplay-wise, it's nuances of the same thing.


So, I propose to change the criteria for how (some) fame stars are earned.

A. Agriculture stars should depend on just the population settled in cities. At first, I thought it was nice that all pops were counted. But upon further reflection, I think this is really a lost opportunity to further create a tension between peaceful and military play. Yes, of course you sink production into creating units to begin with instead of economic projects but those units may earn you combat stars and don't detract from your agriculture stars.

B. Focus builder stars more on wonders or other unusual structures like religious sites. Building quarters is already attractive and can help achieve various other stars through their outputs. Do we really need to extra incentivise building them?

C. I think there would be an interesting gameplay opportunity around merchant and/or diplomatic stars and agreements. Either that merchant stars instead depend on the number of resource deals or gold earned from resources only. Or that diplomacy stars depend on the number of active treaties. Either one of these would be a very nice orthogonal gameplay, incentivising a different gameplay approach to purely engine building. Sins of a Solar Empire 1 has a simple impementation for the latter, feeding into a diplomatic victory.

D. Maybe influence could be linked more to adopted social policies. This could create an interesting tension with territorial expansion and city management.

E. Not too many ideas on science stars. Maybe it could depend more on discovering a given technology first. Though only awarding points based on that seems too harsh. There would also be a considerable interface issue in knowing/not knowing which rivals have already researched what technology.


But maybe others have more and better ideas how the era star gameplay could be differentiated more.