I haven't noticed any scaling. Adjacency bonuses do not seem to affect ideology generation. At least if you hover the mouse over the building no increase is listed.

A major flaw IYAM, is that unless you play with a large number of habitable planets, the ideology system stalls and virtually stops in many games.

I would think that the ideology choices should be made available on all maps and all habitable planet settings.

Thanks for that , but I was more referring to the fact that if u have a galaxy with 10 planets, or one that has 1000 planets. The ideology points you gain from buildings dosnt scale up or down. Meaning you will either gain them to fast, or in most cases where you have fewer planets. What feels like way to slow.

So taking my current huge map for example, I have ten planets each gaining 1 ideology  point every 10 turns. So to get 100 points I have to wait 100 turns.. And that's just for one extra trait. Then I start from scratch again but now have to wait another 110 turns.. An on an on an on. Considering the average game for most people is 300 turns.. . notice average.. That's not many extra traits by end game. That's why paul apparently was thinking of either scaling the cost of gain from buildings up or down depending on map size an planets available.

Take some planets?

Indeed. Now if we could sterilise a planet and *then* colonise, I could really pick up some benevolence points 

Influence doesn't give you Ideology.  There's a one-per-colony Ideology building for each alignment (plus a one-per map galactic achievement), and that doesn't benefit from adjacency bonuses on it's ideology point production.

yeah, it's a problem. So, how about this:

(1) the adjacency bonuses absolutely have to apply to the ideology part of the buildings, not just their other aspects. Given the dearth of ways to generate Ideology post-colonization, you need some way to generate ideology at a reasonable pace.

(2) Get Ideology from invasions. Invasion tactics should encompass choices which generate ideology (buff or nerf the Invasion tactic's success based on the type of invasion used, and the choice made).  If I chose to drop rocks on a planet, I should get Malevolent ideology. If I go for something like a Propaganda campaign, I should get Benevolent.  I'd go with 5 points per successful invasion.

(3) Get Ideology from flipping planets. Like #2, you should be presented with some choices when the planet flips, and the bonus/penalty applied along with the Ideology award.

(4) Scale the ideology slightly by map size.  Small maps should never expect to get more than about 10 ideology choices, but the lack of scaling now means they hardly ever get more than 3-4.

I thought so

Still, it kinda locks you in to having to go with the buildings, which is not ideal.

Also, are the AI smart enough to notice and choose that? 

I feel that, on large maps, it is way too easy to pursue all 3 ideological paths.  Imho, once you start down a way by your choices, it should become increasingly difficult to stear your nation toward another path.  At present, you can start benevolent, pick the building the produces ideology, make a few neutral choices during colonization, pick neutral, make a few malevolent choices, pick the malevolent building.  From then on, you can advance at a nice pace through all idelogical choices.  And then, the AI can not cope with you.  You get research, influence, morale, diplomacy bonus, inability for the AI to declare war on you until you are ready of have achieved a better diplomatic stance with them - all at the same time.  Push a little further down that path, you get free ships + planets&starbases that flip to your side.

Now, there are ways to change that, to make the game a little bit tougher to play, give the AI a chance.

Scaling for large maps is one way to do it.

Another way is to make ideological choices more expensive once you have chosen a path.  As soon as you make one choice in pragmatic, the choices in the other 2 trees could become way more expensive.  See, imagine real life nations/organizations like the US and ISIS.  ISIS beheads people on camera, we shrugg, we expect it.  Imagine if we saw a video of US soldiers beheading ISIS prisoners?  There would be public outcry in the US and elsewhere.  So, the game should try to reflect that, once you are pursuing a choice, it's harder to steer your nation somehwere else.

Maybe the buildings producing ideological traits could be limited to one per colony, meaning that once I build the Preparedness center on my colony, I can no longer build the Missionary Center and Intimidation Center on that same planet.  That would probably be closer to what the developpers intended to do in the first place, if I'm not mistaken?  It would make it a lot harder to pursue all 3 ideological paths at the same time.  It won't prevent you from making "evil" choices some times and a "benevolent" choice at other times, but you won't reap the benefits of all the trees since that is a little bit nonsensical.

There's some ideology points for random events too. But most are colonization. In general, I think the cost increases too fast. What if the increased cost was inverted? So instead of one pragmatic buy increases pragmatic by 10 and malevolent by 5, instead pragmatic goes up by 5 and malevolent by 10. Then focusing would be incentivised and splitting trees works for the cheap decisions, but the more you do it the harder it gets.

There's one mercenary ship for hire during age of war that generates 5 malevolent points each time it wins a battle.