The ones you listed are the biggest imbalances, IMO. The social construction should be more like 250 (having it 1/4 what a supply ship gives is ridiculous). The FoW one should be larger radius. And the influence... 10,000 isn't too bad later in the game, on longer games it doesn't seem overpowered) but maybe that could be a percentage of current influence (e.g., add N% to planet's current influence).
I'd love to have artifact frequency settings as well, that would help.
IMO those are not even the biggest OP artifacts.
One Empathic engine, and crank taxes up to 100% for basically long enough to win the game. Combine it with the Echoing Heartstone for 10k influence, build up some tourism, and you get to run up against the 1 quadrillion credit limit for the second half of the game (i.e. once your treasury reaches 1,000,000bc, you can't go any higher than that. Nor do you need to; you've basically got infinite money).
One Precursor Archive on a small map, rush Planetary Invasion, and the game's over.
Play Xenophobic and get the Motivational Helix for 500 shipyard, rush colony ships like nobody's business...and so much for whatever shipbuilding disadvantage xenophobic had.
The Influence Artifact could possibly be fixed by giving only 250-500 influence at first then have it level up mid game to give more influence.
Side note - If the game had a scaling per map size, not just for Artifacts but in general, more than half the complaints about the game would be moot points.
I gave this game another try. It was fun, one time. Enough to justify my money on a Steam Sale.
Played large galaxy, 7 Incredible AI. Decided I would run a different money-based economy where I build a Port of Call on every planet and run taxes to 100%. Rush-buying a Port of Call generally makes my money back in 1 turn. Colonized an Echoing Heartstone, about halfway into the game I was making 400,000bc per turn. One of my biggest challenges was figuring out how to spend it. I paid cash to the AI's for all their techs; the AI has no clue how to spend it anyway. That put me in the tech lead (over Incredible AI). Bought one guy's planet for 30k bc with an Empathic engine. Now I'm running 94% approval at 100% taxes, and commonwealths be damned. Played an Echoing Heartstone on that planet I bought--mostly for influence defense--but ended up flipping the whole system. Found 3 Echoing Heartstones in the galaxy, so just bought the third one, and once I researched Advanced Foundations I basically had all the charges I needed. Started rush-buying Recruit Citizen, just to keep my bank below 1 million bc. But what citizens do I need? I rush-buy everything. Admins and Commanders. And leaders, which are useful under Fleet priority. All the while, resources are a serious bottleneck. Can never get enough Promethion, Antimatter, Arnor Spice, and especially Durantium. Mercenaries gobbled up a lot (have to hire them before the Incredible AI's do). Struggled a few times with my planets flipping early on, prior to getting Empathy Engine, because my Approval was at 4%. Since I didn't have any spare Echoing Heartstone charges yet, I just rush-bought consulates and culture starbases. Once I was first to Age of Ascension, the Empathy Engine, basically had all the citizens I needed, and none of my planets needed to build anything socially, it was really a question of how fast my ships could move, to mop up. And even that--I purchased Stellar Folding from the Thalans.
Cool game, different economy. Ever since Galciv1, I grew used to the standard model of run a deficit at first to grow your population, then flip over to run in the black. This one was different: it was approval-be-damned, and who cares about production. I rush-buy everything. I wouldn't play it again, though, because this was obviously all messed up on many levels. I had no qualms about exploits--after all, the Incredible AI cheats, incredibly. That's how you beat it: you exploit it.
Oh yeah, I should add: the entire game, I never even researched Interstellar Tourism. Which is messed up, considering that's what my entire game revolved around.
I have used it to get rid of a colony ship that was about to settle a good planet that I wanted but couldn't settle for several more turns. I have also used it to relocate an invasion fleet that was getting too close to one of my planets that didn't have enough defense to prevent the invasion. It does have some uses.
@Tetley
"Decided I would run a different money-based economy where I build a Port of Call on every planet and run taxes to 100%. Rush-buying a Port of Call generally makes my money back in 1 turn."
I didn't think you could buy a Port of Call on more than one planet anymore. Am I wrong about that?
Richard
With the Retribution DLC and the most current version, you are correct, Port of Call can only be built on a single planet.
Which is why I've made my own private Visitor Center mod to allow me to keep extending my tourism to all my planets.
I bought Retribution on the Steam sale and I was rush-buying PoC on every planet.
@ tetley - You using outdated mods? PoC is 1 per player in the xml (Crusade and Upwards as of 3.5/3.6).
<InternalName>PortofCall</InternalName>
<DisplayName>PortofCall_Name</DisplayName>
<ShortDescription>PortofCall_ShortDec</ShortDescription>
<Description>PortofCall_Dec</Description>
<Icon>PortofCall.png</Icon>
<BuildIcon>PortofCall_Build.png</BuildIcon>
<ListIcon>PortofCall_Icon.png</ListIcon>
<ImprovementType>Tourism</ImprovementType>
<PlacementType>Tourism</PlacementType>
<IsPlayerWonder>true</IsPlayerWonder>
While that is possible, I was not using mods--only what Stardock gave me in update 3.7.
Haven't tried it again recently, ever since Stardock said they found the problem which occurred only with the "right" set of DLC. The free AoW3 Steam download they had last week totally captured my attention.
Hehe that free AoW also got my attention as well, hell of a marketing ploy I’ll probably buy all the dlc later on.
Yeah. I'm running un-modded 3.7 and I slap them on every +Tourism tile.
If you can build only one PoC, then what other Tourism improvement is there?
I filed this as a bug report but might as well chime in here. I played a game over the weekend where they were thick on the ground due to an event. Most gave outrageous amounts of Credits, so that I was at the 1,000,000 Credit cap for months at a time.
The other benefits I scarce paid attention to since I had my surveyors on auto, but I didn't see the ones you cite. Probably came with a DLC I don't have...
I don't get why there are so many buildings with leveling bonuses or adjacency effects that have nothing to do with their actual type. It's these inconsistencies that break the game balance all over the place.
P.S.: SD claims they've fixed Tourism. They haven't. It's just less obvious now and needs a wee bit more effort to exploit. Consulates makes it trivial, but even without them it's easy enough. The core of the problem is tying Tourism directly to the AoI. SD should make it relative to the square root of the AoI or similar, then maybe it works for large galaxies as well as small ones.
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