Krynn Environmental research is granting +5 adjacency bonus for manu and science but only + 1 for economics. Not sure if it's intended (I'm guessing you wanted + 1 for each of those?).

Also I was wondering if your mod works with the snathi dlc and new tech tree? I wasn't going to buy it, but might now that I heard there was a new tech tree to go with it, I might pick it up.

Precursor souvenir shop, Krynn special building - colony unique. This building kinda struggles with all the tourism updates you've done. It's essentially the same thing as the standard level 2 tourism building (both increase tourism by 100% and both provide 2 levels bonus to tourism). It does proved +1 income instead of the (global) morale boost of a normal tourism building.

However once you get to level 3 tourism building (+ 200% tourism +3 global morale) it kinda loses its place, if it ever had one (+1 income vs +2% empire wide morale). I thought about using them on non tourist worlds, as they do provide +2 to wealth adjacency as well, but you get more bang for your buck with with standard econ buildings. I kinda see this as a real hub location for tourism (though debatable if the Krynn should be the masters of this?) which is kinda lacking right now except for actual galaxy or player uniques. Even the same stats but a better adjacency bonus and perhaps a better tourism multiplier? As it stands right now the global scope bonus on standard tourism buildings is pretty hard to pass up.

Hey, just want to throw you a quick suggestion:

I'd been sort of annoyed with how the AI will declare war on you even if you're on the other side of the galaxy and can't ever reach you. For the player, this doesn't really matter too much because you can effectively ignore it. But, for the AI, it throws them into a war strategy, which diverts their focus towards a military buildup that they don't need. This can screw them over in the long run, especially if the war starts early game.

I found a pretty good remedy for this, and it's super easy: remove wormhole anomalies. 80% of the time, when you meet a civ that's absolutely nowhere near you, it's because either yours or their survey ship gets spit out somewhere random in the galaxy. In a couple of soaks, I've found this really goes a long way to prevent pointless long-distance wars between AIs. The downside is that the player might have to wait a while longer and do more dedicated exploring to meet all the civs in the galaxy, but I feel the benefits to the AI outweigh that consequence.

It is kinda tempting, but I'm loathe to remove features from Vanilla unless they're totally broken.

I'll wait for 1.5 and see if SD manage to make diplo work better. If there's no significant improvement, then ok, wormholes can die.

I've not altered AI sb behaviour in months. Might be worth checking if this is in vanilla too. 

Hopefully will do a release this weekend, if I can stop playing fallout 4 by then....

Not sure if it's intended but the shrine of Tandis adds 0.3 Global Morale (to every planet) - Altarian Tech. The amount is so small it doesn't really make a dent in anything.

Few other questions, as I was digging into the files. I'm sure you've worked on this, but I'm wondering how 100 turn strategies in the files actually effect the AI? It struck me that I'm often still in the colonization phase (often well after turn 100) with no need for much of a military unless I find myself right up against another AI. These plans seem to cap out at turn 100, and ofc well before that the AI turns its attention to a (generally) useless military build up of obsolete ships.

I'm still finding that the AI should really colonize more in the early game. It is so easy to outpace them, and even though they do start to colonize again later, its often too late to make much difference. Either that or fore the player to slow it down.

I noticed Missiles disproportionately effect military score. Build a few missile frigates and your score sky rockets, where as a few kinetic ships you dont see much of a budge.

I think the AI focuses too much on offense for it's ships. Often they are pretty much all weapons with a few token defenses. I love the changes to beef up defenses in general, but the AI ignores them for now.

AI seems to kinda have gone into a sleep state when it comes to other AI's. I rarely see them at war with one another, and never take planets from each other (unless by influence).

Still have not seen an AI build up anything other than economic/mining modules on starbases yet. Seems to be something that got broken with 1.4 by stardock.

I appreciate how difficult it must be to balance carriers. I wish we could have a separate hull size just for fighters, would be much easier to balance.

Overall, its amazing to reflect the amount of change even since I've started playing this mod. I started in 1.2xx and many amazing changes since then I still think you should work on the incredible / godlike difficulty levels for us more hardcore players. I'm still custom adding in difficulty lines to beef up the AI, but I'm not very good at it yet

Just wanted to add that the AI can be very strong if it gets a good start. I've seen it adapt to my attacks of choice (this is late game) and generally build up strong fleets and attack relentlessly in the late game. Its just that this is still somewhat rare (about 1/3 games) even with the bonuses I give it.

Actually that could be an interesting idea. What if carriers costed 30-40 logistics for ONE but could have a tonne of fighters? You'd never see more than one (or 2 and nothing else) in a fleet. I wonder if it is possible in the files though?

On a somewhat related matter, what if one of the decision trees forced players to choose between capacity vs logistics. Currently these are the two most important picks and they are usually in separate trees. That way you could have a big ship focus vs large fleet (quality vs quantity as it were).

A bit more balance feedback:

Would be nice if the 'immune to nebula' trait was scaled back. The new nebula you've made are really neat to see and utilize, however once a generic level of tech is achieved all the AI ships ignore the nebula. Perhaps this trait should be limited to components requiring strategic resources?

Overall love your beefed up defenses. Makes ships much more interesting to balance between power and protection - however the current build standards of the AI favor the 'glass cannon' approach, which is no longer particularly relevant with your mod. Big boost to the AI if it could built better balanced ships with more defense.

The modules on starbases that increase attack / defense are probably too strong considering the AI is now ignoring all starbase modules other than economic/mining modules. The one that increases defenses goes 10+ 25+ and 50+ percent for nearly double the defense. I'd be ok with it if the AI understood that it needed to target my starbases, or could utilize it as well but as of now they do not making it pretty op.

Carriers are probably too weak now. I'd recommend either A) going back to 2 per module and changing the advanced module (still cant imagine why I'd want 3 types of fighter in one fight) to something different OR changing the filler components again but require fighters to have at least one engine, or something a long those lines. Right now its as I said 15 mass for one weapon and one of each defense + an extra body to shoot at.

The AI does, as you said, start colonizing again late. If left alone they can do pretty well. However the player can build a huge lead that is hard for the AI to come back from. Not sure if either the player's early colonizing needs to be slowed down, or something can be done to force the AI to colonize more in the early game.

Mod gets better with every update, interested to see what 1.5 will bring!

The ideological tree pragmatic - trait Watchful all ships receive a free fighter escort does not appear to work - either in my influence or within a 5 tile radius of either my planets or starbases. Not sure if its bugged in the regular game as well.

I was wondering if advanced carrier modules could function in tandem with the earlier pick (interceptor or guardian with possibly another module for beams if you make no choice) so you get 3 fighters with the same weapon loadout. Unless I'm missing something here, and it might be ok somehow to have a mixed force?

looks like a great set of  changes !

Also noticed this in the 1.5 opt in change log:

• Changed flavor text definitions so that they can have groups appended to with mods.
• Changed the preclusion rule so that the player can build a single improvement from a set that you've defined

I'm sure you'll find a lot to do with that second one

when you say you updated the code to 1.5 compatible, does that mean we could get a 1.5 opt in release? I'm dying to play test the new diplo features but couldn't even imagine playing vanilla at this point

1.5.1 released:

Hmmm, might be due to the stacking penalty. Though it never used to cause a problem.