Opportunity costs.
Starbase spam becomes much more important with the nerf to higher tier buildings.
You'll also have to reduce the power of starbase manufacturing modules to bring it in line.
Most likely, yes.
Also, are you sure you want to keep the "build everything in 1 turn" possibility?
I don't want to, but I cannot prevent at least some worlds from managing this without crippling the AI. If you have a class 30 planet with all top-level factories and 100+ population set to 100% industry, 100% military, then it's pretty much going to make anything in 1 turn. If I prevent that by making the possible constructs more expensive, then the AI will still try to build them with it's wealth-specced planets on 40-50% industry spending and 60% military output.
The problem is the initial factory gives too big of a boost. A better idea would be to nerf factories downwards to 10%, with each upgrade +5% (the last one in the tree providing +15%) AND dramatically increase all production costs of higher tier ships and ship components/weapons.
That way getting overpowered higher tier ships that can destroy lots of low tiered ships becomes much more difficult. This opens the possibility of "rushing" (building a bunch of lower tiered ships and take out an enemy who is teching to higher tier). It opens up many more strategical choices.
Again, possibly correct. But I want to see feedback from players after a decent number of games first. For starters, nerfing the base factories too much will massively slow down the early game, which is something I'm trying to speed up a bit atm. For seconds, I'm still not sold on your assumption that never researching higher-tier buildings is worthwhile. 10 factories giving 30% production bonus is a fairly big increase on 10 factories giving 25%, let alone the higher-tier stuff which is upto twice as powerful.
The problem right now is that with the current mechanics the best strategy is to research and build NO MILITARY for an extended period of time. The game can get very boring during that time. The period of being able to "rush" an enemy is so short that it's pointless (because once your economy is up, you can build and/or tech everything in 1 turn).
This is simply untrue, tbh; I know because I followed pretty much that exact strategy last night and by around turn 100 I found myself surrounded by larger enemy empires, each of which was militarily far in advance of my own, and I was going bankrupt while . You're probably right if you're discussing the base game, but not so much with the mechanics now in the mod. It makes the economy far more dependent on population rather than having lots of colony capitals (like vanilla) that the potential rush period is actually quite large, while sitting around not researching or building military vessels.
In fact, I found that all the general aspects of the 'optimal' exploit-heavy vanilla strategy were now pretty much awful. Colony spam plunges you into a crippling recession once you hit 15-20 planets, simply because there's not enough production that can be pushed into wealth to pay for it until several wealth-dedicated planets have large populations. Ignoring your military leads to falling way behind and getting dragged into wars before you've finished trying to expand (and the AI is very good at getting to and then mass-producing large hulls now). Ignoring research early is less effective than actually doing research, since building more colonies is just going to bankrupt you while you need higher-level building bonuses to remain competitive and grow.
Also, your mod does include Vid's changes to the AI, correct?
Not exactly the same changes, but very, very similar ones. I've fixed the same stuff he has, but my version is again tailored to the larger maps, so ranges and distances are correspondingly larger.
