As far as population goes, I know that it = raw production, then times modifiers is everything else. The thing is though, even on "specialized" income planets, I never made that many credits.
Sqrt(population) = raw production. Huge difference. Getting more than about 20 pop on a planet is debatable. A big driver for getting credits is using the adjacency on colony and player uniques. Though... balance is weird atm. Just make a lot of ship manufacturing planets and crank out Treasure Hunt. It's kinda ridicuous.
My military for most of the game was ranked #5, and I noticed that my research was #1, and my fleets were SIGNIFICANTLY more powerful than my enemies. Is this ranking actually based on number of ships instead of type?
Not sure about the exact calculation, but the .xml files
seem to imply, it is calculated from attack, defense and and hitpoints (with a heavy bias towards hitpoints). If your ships where low HP high attack, that may be the reason. If your ships used evasion and repair, that might be another reason.
Malevolent ideology has a trait that makes their planets and starbases immune to culture flip. Doesn't that essentially break a whole style of gameplay?
Not sure how deep it is down the branch, but I think it's also a big trade-off for not getting other ideologies.
The starbases themselves were excessively weak, laughably so. Anyway, without stationing a whole fleet onto them, to fix this?
In the early game they are actually really strong. The problem is, that even with defense components, they don't scale well into the lategame. Given the AIs relative weakness regarding equiping their ships with engines, good sensors on a few starbases and a fast response fleet or two do the trick aswell.
The promotions on some seem like a no-brainer, and on others seem ridiculously weak. As an example, why would you ever NOT promote a general to supreme general, or an administrator to a minister? Sure, the administrator dies, but you keep the administration points, and it's not like their a resource accrued over time, so what is the point of not doing it?
None. They're still in the process of figurnig out balance on some things.
On the flip side, sacrifice a farmer for a 10% food boost? He natively provides 30%, and since food is global, that's way, way better than an empire-wide buff.
Well, depends on the number of food planets you have. But that's all I can say about it, mostly playing sythetics or silicates.
I also realized about 3/4ths through that citizens affects stack: As far as that goes, do % bonuses stack multiplicatively or additively?
Save very few exceptions, it is additively. manufacturing from your pacing setting is an exception to this, it is multiplied to the base value separately from workers and improvements, although they are both listed in the tooltip. Reseatch cloisters used to stack multiplicatively with planetary stuff, but I don't know if they still do.
Lastly, about the tech tree, from what I recall reading several techs are now tied to traits, rather than races. I started several games as each of the races to look at the tree, and I didn't see much difference (exception was drengion, who's slave mechanic drove a huge difference). Is there a list of these techs, or any notable ones I should be looking for?
Slave technologies from slavers is good.
Ancient provides ship boosts in the engineering tree, with an age of ascencion tech, which makes all ships free of maintenance and have 5 points of tactical repair for free.
Unwavering provides some ship boosts in the military tree (invasion, for whatever reason), which are pretty good.
Vigilant has some additional improvements (which provide movement to ships among other things)
I am not aware of a list yet. And I am not sure the tech tree is settled yet.
Thanks in advance guys [...].
You're welcome.
