Okay, I'd just like to point out that I have long since changed my opinion about lighthouses; I was confused as to their purpose, I thought they were meant to be detection building of some sort that made the content of starlanes visible or something like that. Their purpose is more logistics oriented, and could stand to be renamed to reflect that better.
We can fairly easily add terraforming buildings right now... ...They could be chained, allowing successively built buildings to move a planet several type steps.
Good. Making up new content is such a simple matter, but it will likely forestall improvements on current content.
For example:
The detection and visibility system is coming up, I was wondering if the Void Enclave Temple could be an oracle structure instead. This oracle would allow a new detection rule, or change an existing stealth rule. It seems to fit logically into the tech tree scheme, and a specialized detection building might make more sense than a research building.
The Caducean Institute seems a like a hospital of some sort. What if it also protected against biological weapons instead of just increased health? Or merge with the genebank and have the genebank do that instead of a research bonus. This will make it a partly defensive building that fosters population growth and protects population from direct attack, rather than having (yet another) vague, ambiguous research building.
Or, renaming the building so they are less specific. I'm all for uniqueness and originality, but some of them sound too unique or wonderful, like you're only supposed build one of each
. (Living Planet, Orbital Gardens, Deep Green, Commercial Union, etc.)
We can do things like making most production-boosting buildings have large negative penalties to farming or other resource meters.
and
There should be some buildings that have negative and positive meter-altering effects.
Like paradise planet does? Okay, but please don't make them too common, that will frustrate other buildings, such as buildings filling in niches within a grand strategy.
More interestingly, if most buildings have significant negative effects that project out over an area that cover several systems, interesting things can result.
I'd like to see how that pans out, because economic sinkhole is the only one that seems to do that.
This acts a bit like a player-controlled strategic resource.
Could this extend to planet specials as strategic resources? (example: only being able to build heavy mining processors on inferno worlds or worlds that are tectonically stable)
I agree with buildings being designed such that they fit into a greater strategic scheme rather being the strategy all by themselves. The choice between building up or building out is not just cliche in 4X strategy, but sort of self defeating when you have an infrastructure meter, so buildings generally should fill in niches within grand strategies in FO the way I see it.