- Make possible tall vs Wide strategic differentiation.
- Improve usability and usefulness of Terraforming and Gaia.
1A: Further differentiate bonuses from growth techs:
- Wide: focused on getting access to worse environments (more planets) and increasing pop. in those environments, hardly improving habitability of good planets.
- Tall: focused on increasing population on better environments and improving the environments (terraforming).
For 2 we need 1B and make the buildings require less micromanagement.
Suggested changes:
"Wide" (environment tolerance) pop. bonuses, affected by species trait, give more bonuses to poor and hostile:
Tech | Good | Adeq. | Poor | Host. | Notes |
Symbiotic Biology | 1 | 2 | 1 | ||
Xeno. Genetics | 1 | 2 | 2 | ||
Xeno Hybrids | 1 | 1 | 3 | ||
Cyborgs | 1 | 2 | 3 | Troops bonus |
"Tall" (habitability) pop. bonuses, unaffected by species trait, give more bonuses to good and adequate and less to poor and hostile:
Tech | Good | Adeq. | Poor | Host. | Notes |
Subterranean Hab. | 1 | 1 | |||
Orbital Hab. | 2 | 1 | 1 | ||
N-Dimensional Str. | 4 | 2 | 1 | 1 | |
Terraforming | Improves environment one step | ||||
Gaia | 4 | Automatic terraforming effect |
Gaia is allowed in any colony (instead of just good env. ones) and becomes the automatic terraforming. Production costs and time depends on environment tolerance:
PP cost: adequate x2, poor x3, hostile x5.
Turns: adequate x1.5, poor x2, hostile x3.
Turning it into automatic greatly reduces terraforming micromanagement late game, and increases simplicity of use: you only have to build one building per planet, and you know in advance how much will it cost to get to good+gaia environment.
I still have to crunch numbers for base terraforming and gaia costs depending on colony ship costs.
And review tech prerequisites to not force tall empires to research wide techs when going for terraforming and gaia (gaia can have simbiotic biology but not the xeno. techs or any expensive prereq. of those).