Swarm planet eating: 200 per tile ? 4k for 20 tile planet. 2 battleships per planet eaten. This is way too low since you are also taking any income that planet would made. It's interesting to use with cede planet to deny enemy territory and on small 10 planets you would not use anyway.

Mineral/tile ratio shoud be a lot bigger and perk shoud add mineral storage.

At least resource yield will be changed (I didn't want energy yield to be higher than terraforming cost, will be fixed in another way in upcoming update). For now you will have to build more minerals silos :P, might add a cap though, it is a good idea.

Originally posted by Girion:

At least resource yield will be changed (I didn't want energy yield to be higher than terraforming cost, will be fixed in another way in upcoming update). For now you will have to build more minerals silos :P, might add a cap though, it is a good idea.

With increased minerals per planet tile perk feels viable now. Playing as devouring swarm right now , processing aliens and if they try to rebel : boom planet consumed. Feels great.

Some of the perks need a tighter cap on the bonus they provide if they're based on stockpiles. They scale kind of oddly.

For example, playing as a one-planet empire, I was able to get one new tradition every 12-24 months due to the Purpose of Profit bonus. I was fielding the largest fleet power in my 1000-star game due to all the traditions and perks I farmed. With one planet.

Similarly for the Sound Investment Principles. I could simply farm the interest income, and trade it for limitless minerals.

The issue is by simply making one fixed cap (like Purpose of Profit's 1000 cap), you risk making it overpowered for small empires, or too weak to be useful for very large empires. I'd recommend making the cap based on population instead.

A few things of note:

Not sure if you'd call this a bug or an exploit, but... The Ecumenopolis' main drawback, the negative habitability (for the planet itself, and for individual factories) is ignored by synthetics. Meaning they can squeeze many times more mineral production out of those planets than organic races. Especially when you make a machine world a Ecumenopolis. I'd consider replacing the habitability penalty with happiness penalty (so it affects synthetic citizens too), and/or a penalty for robotic pops so plays can't just spam a planet full of Factory IIIs.

Also, the growth speed (or robotic pop construction) penalty seems easy to bypass by resettling pops. Might want to add a penalty for transfering, else maybe get rid of it entirely.

Some really good suggestions regarding purpose of profit and investment. Will be in sooner or later. It's true that you can circumvent som of the ecumenopolis penalties in some ways. But thats hard to fix. Might give local pop maintainence a boost though. Possibility to remove it for machines and give them some repkacement upgrade to machine worlds.

I would consider giving each ecumenopolis factory a +X% robot upkeep cost on the planet. It will do the same thing as the habitability penalty: make each additional factory more costly for the whole planet. Much easier than making an entirely different version just for robots.

Concerning the profit and investment: The main reason it doesn't balance well right now is that large and small nations have roughly the same base energy storage. So they can earn roughly the same fixed amount of interest. That's why I recommended making the limit based on population.

Though personally I'd use both a fixed amount AND a further bonus based on population. The reason I recommend having part of it being a fixed number is to retain some of the advantage for smaller nations (just not the extreme it is now), since obviously smaller nations need the help more than larger nations.

Can the "Home In The Stars" perk also unlock some better habitat buildings?

Planet-side buildings are considerably more potent in this mod than in vanilla. However, habitat-based buildings are not. This ends up making habitat tiles produce only 25-33% the output of each planet tile (or closer to 20% if you include things like adjacency boosting buildings or planet-wide output boosters that can't be built on habitats).

When you consider that each pop also increases tradition and research costs, the very low productivity-per-tile of habitats almost makes them not worth it.

The Addon have a perk that does just that (it has to be in the addon becasue the new Buildings are upgrades of the old ones, and this requires me to change the vanilla habitat Buildings file to add the new Buildings as upgrades)

If you're worried about incompatibility with this mod, maybe you could instead give Home In the Skies perk a passive +50% or +100% to outputs on habitats. Or a non-upgraded building that does something similar. That way you can make habitats more viable without messing with the buildings file.

I'm only somewhat sure that this is from this mod, but theres a perk that gives unity for completing techs? and.... it gives waaaaay too much unity.

The per pop power/unity limit perks are direct nerfs to Tall empires and is sadly disappointing to me. (Also, the Hivemind planet consumption is rarely worth the perk for the rewards compared to the cost. Maybe Hiveworld terraforming instead?)

That was intended. A problem with those perks was that they grow grow insanely powerful for small empires. If you think they have been nerfed to a level were you do not want to pick them that might be a problem though.

Thanks for the consume planet input, some kine of terraforming is a neat idea (although maybe as an upgrade). Might increase the resource gain even more, although I think that planets are to valuable for a sensible amount of resources to be a fair trade.

Update on the Hivemind planet consumption, I feel it would be much better if "consuming" the planet made it barren like it does now but instead adds minerals/energy/research that can be collected via mining/research stations.

(The Endless swarm perk extra pops are great but the extra corvettes sadly aren't too helpful around the point in the game of whence you actually get the perk.)

That's an interesting idea actually, thanks for it :)