Method for purchasing ideology points

One of the mods up is the Galactic Star Trek mod. This is a full change mod and one of the cool features is it has ideology projects (in addition) to the buildings. This gives the player more options to do right off the bat rather than constantly build and pay for building maintenance (something that should be more expensive). 

I'd rather not make Ideology purchasable, because that just gives wealthy empires yet another advantage (making them ever more OP).

If we go the purchase route, then it removes a lot of incentive to build Ideology-generating buildings; replacing them with wealth-creating buildings is almost certainly a better strategy in that case.

For the same reason that Experience shouldn't be purchasable, I don't want Ideology available through money.

At least in the G.S.T. mod, you have to forgo manufacturing things to get ideology, and it's more painful that way than merely buying your way to Ideology bonuses.

There are specialised buildings which can drip feed you ideology points (and they do add up if you use multiple buildings). I honestly think being able to purchase them with $$$ is way OP and wouldn't want in an un-modded game.

OK what about this. . . instead of being able to purchase, they make the Tier 1 ideologies cheaper than the Tier 2, etc.  The thing that sucks is that you've unlocked a bunch already, a Tier 1 technology can cost like 60 points which sucks.  Tier 1 should always cost like 20 or 30 at the most.

Actually that is not a problem i have with the system. Instead of having points adding in the same ideology. They should be added once and my types of choices counted and i get the one i chose the most. In this case if i changed the types of choices it would be affected over time. The only exception is the buildings. It also adds points towards a type of decision. In case of a tie it would be pragmatic. This would make your choices more meaningful. 

Well...

I think the idea is that Ideology is not like the Tech tree, which is a "collect them all" strategy.  Rather, Ideology is about specialization and picking a path - that is, it's about depth, not breadth.   They tried that with the choice techs (pick 1 of 3), but people really didn't like that, so we're back to Get 'Em 'All in tech.

Keeping Ideology so that you're NOT going to have breadth, but rather have narrow paths of abilities, I think is important to keep it distinct from the tech tree.

Well your looking at itby tiers. Their looking at it more progressive the previous is always cheaper than the next. Way back in beta on other threads people asked for thisinstead of all techs being the same.

So you mean every branch starting at the same fixed price at each tier, with each tier after progressively increasing at the same rate in terms of price?

I can see your point and I think it would require re-balancing. If you haven't tried it, though, I would really recommend adjusting your strategy to accommodate the use of the specialized building. For example, I use the benevolent tree and I'll first target the Missionary Centre, which provides a bonus to influence as well as an ideology point every five turns. I build these on multiple worlds and develop a pretty steady income. Combined with more colonisation and galactic events (mega or otherwise), I have found that it's quite easy to gain ideology points and continue developing each trait under my selected ideology. 

The problem with ideology is the brick wall you hit because of the expense multiplier.

But i think it works pretty good, so the way to fix that problem is to have a late tech tree tech to increase the productivity of Ideology structures so you can breathe a bit of life back into ideology later on in the game.

Easier to uncomment the 3 vanilla Ideology projects from the PlanetProjects.xml and be done with it

Yes this is kind of what I'm getting after.  I put a "Missionary Center" on all of my planets pretty much.  So let's say I have 15 planets producing a 15 benevolent points every 10 turns.  And let's say I unlock Tiers 1-5 of one particular branch of the Benevolent tree.  My problem is that to then start down another branch, even the Tier 1 items are like 50 or 60 points.  And that would be to get like a free colony ship or something crappy at that point in the game. 

Mainly I'd just like a system where unlocking the higher tiers doesn't increase the cost of the lower tiers.  Unlocking a tier should only increase the cost of that tier and higher tiers.

Hopefully that makes sense.

It makes sense, but it is indeed contrary to the present design, which encourages you to get the lower tiers while they are cheap and meaningful and then decide which tier 5 perks to go for.  Especially if you mix Ideology choices.  The progress of Ideology varies so much according to map size, planet distribution, and player choices that I think the designers covered an awful lot of possibilities in a seemingly simple set of matrices.  You are right that there are other approaches, but this one seems to me to cover a lot of bases.