It would be xenophobia, and worth noting that's not finished yet, we're planning/hoping to have xenophobes unable to build ships at a planet without at least X happiness (probably, short term, 5), but the only reason it's not implemented is the AI team have far more important things to work on and it'll take some work for them, we're going to probably give each xenophobe a preferred focus to at least give them a chance.defaultuser wrote:Another use for colony ships came up in a game I just played. I had Eaxaw as a conquered species, and on some compatible worlds they wouldn't build colony starts or in one case started then switched the turns to "Never". I'm guessing xenophobic interference from too many other inhabited planets or lack of Eaxaw planets with sufficient "happiness" or something. I was able to bring colony ships to those worlds.
Note: the happiness malus is for each populated planet within 5 jumps within your empire that doesn't have a concentration camp to kill the nasty squidgy things, the idea is they're a completely different approach to the game, you actually have to be nasty to use them.
I look forward to us being able to implement that but it's not going to be immediately (unless someone that groks python wants to give it a try on the AI side).
@Vezzra, I think the current balance between the costings is about right, it's rarely, if ever, better to build a ship over an outpost plus colony, if it is better it's because of supply issues or other strategic concerns. And I'm good with that. Gets more and more true as the game goes on with the upkeep multipliers.
Whether the cost of colonising in general compared to other things is balanced is of course a different discussion.