I see the reasoning, though I think it's flawed - with a bigger radius and a smaller exclusion range, you're encouraging lots of stacking. At present you can only cover a single planet with, at most, 6 bases. If the exclusion range is reduced at the same time that the range is increased, that number will go up, meaning more bases built per planet. It encourages more constructor spam, not less.

I'm not necessarily against increasing the radius; I'd prefer that to happen through additional high-level modules though. But no, I don't see any good game play justification for reducing the exclusion range so long as SBs can have all four rings. If they're put back to 1-ring-each then I'd ditch exclusion altogether, but I'm not up for encouraging insanely high SB bonuses from 12+ stacked bases - especially when I can't possibly control the AI's usage of them to that extent.

Shouldn't the Synthetic Pop Caps in the Yor tech tree be increased?

Farms produce A LOT more food now in this mod.  But it seems like the synthetic pop caps have not been increased.  

I have been playing a game with Yor on this mod...

The lack of Market Centers hurts since money is so hard to come by in this mod.  But the lack of Entertainment buildings really hurts.  The only options to increase Yor morale are to take "Supportive Population" (+4) and "Easy to Please" (+4), which will get you to 11 morale.  With "Populist Party" (+20%) you can get 13.  With the Intimidation Center you can get 18.  Beyond that and you are spamming starbases.

Now that pop grows so much more quickly, this simply isn't sufficient.

Yor needs to be rebalanced in general, but specifically for this Mod it would make sense to increase the bonuses from "Supportive Population" and "Easy to Please" to match the new scale of population.  (Maybe 10 for each, if not more.)  That's more of a general improvement, though, and the Yor still needs additional help otherwise a Yor player is forced to always take those techs.

Regarding my post just above...

One option to fix the Yor approval mess would simply be the give a flat Approval bonus at each of the Techs where other races get to build upgraded Approval buildings.  For example:

Xeno Entertainment: +5 Morale

Population Diversion: +5 Morale

Superior Recreation: +5 Morale

Contentment: +5 Morale

In many ways, this is still a big disadvantage, since other races start with the ability to build Entertainment Center (+10 morale) and get new upgrades at each of these levels.  The total Morale boost from the Yor approval techs (+20) would be far less than those available to other races.  But the advantage for the Yor is that the approval bonuses propagate instantaneously and don't require new buildings.  

Another fix is to add a morale bonus to the Yor Matrix buildings.  E.g. The Power Matrix gives +4 cap, so it could also have a bonus of +4 (or at least +2) morale.

Finally, the specializations that give bonuses ("Supportive Population" and "Easy to Please") should give a a larger bonus: +6 at minimum and maybe +10.

These changes would make the Yor competitive at least.

0.8 released:

Should see markedly better performance from the AI now, particularly the Yor and the Altarians. Culture is less of the sick man of victory conditions; the AI matures better and does well for longer than previously. Also, culture planets are now the best way to acquire culture, rather than industrial planets spamming culture projects, and cheesing the ideology trees is now much more difficult.

I was reading on another post about the thalans. This doesn't matter with the iconians because they are also overpowered, but you could supe up the fusion, and quantum power plants. This could be done by either changing the hives to total manufacturing, or changing the power plants for base production. About morale for the yor do you remember charging stalks. The other post suggested the thalans, krynn, altarians, and I can't. Remember who else is to much alike.

0.9 sneak peak:

Likely to be released Wednesday or Thursday; I'm out of town this weekend.

I'm having a pretty damn awesome game with it atm.

Top 10:

Me - 56 planets, score 4k, 200 ships.

The Geth - 67 planets, score 3.6k, 285 ships.

The Iconians - 57 planets, score 1.7k, 141 ships.

The Altarians - 39 colonies, score 1492, 92 ships ( have suffered appalling losses recently).

The Yor - 35 colonies, score 1450, 137 ships

The Krynn - 57 colonies, score 1372, 110 ships

The Quarian Conclave - 46 colonies, 1347 score, 113 ships

The Burran - 41 colonies, 1319 score, 128 ships

The Elcor Courts - 46 colonies, 1305 score, 131 ships

Odair Enclave - 42 colonies, 1276 score 145 ships

It's now turn 250ish and I've pretty much outpaced the AI now, mostly because they can never, ever match planet specialization. But there's actually a Great Power system evolving in the galaxy atm,  with multiple heavily armed, highly populated industrial powerhouses, any one of which cannot seriously try to take on two of the others at once.

The Geth from the Mass Effect Race pack are positively terrifying. They're within spitting distance of my score, have a larger population than I do, own 20% more planets and have a gigantic navy. I'm mostly staying ahead of them based on technologies; I've got all the governance techs which are allowing me to remain slightly ahead on raw production. Once they start picking those up, I may actually be in trouble, though I suspect I have enough of a tech lead now not to have to worry.

The Iconians are a bit of a dark horse. Their empire is one of the biggest numerically, and they're no slouches militarily; they're also involved in a lot of trade and have a powerful economy. They're just at the very edge of my field of view presently, beyond the Altarians and the Geth, and I've had no real interactions with them as yet; I do know they have a fair number of techs that I don't.

I enjoyed a lengthy arms race with the Altarians, who pushed me into two bloody wars (including a number of planetary invasion attempts, one of which even got through to the surface. It failed, but killed 10 million of my people at a stroke), and made me max-out my economy; I had to sell techs to one of the other AIs (who swindled me blind) in order to keep up with them. The Altarians even beat me to large ships, and started lobbing huge death-fleets at my colonies that left me scrambling to defend. At one stage, I was even kinda worried that the Altarians would beat me; they had more, bigger ships, they had planetary invasion (I hadn't even picked up the preceding tech); and their economy seemed to be bearing up better than mine. Thankfully, they went to war with two other neighbours (the middle-ranking Thalans and the terrifying Geth) at the same time, allowing me to put a proper defense into position. Their economy eventually began to collapse from 60+ turns at war, and the Geth are now pummeling them with a pair of massive 19-strong fleets of experimental tiny ships; their navy is close to annihilation. Their score was previously near 3k.

The Yor are doing well, in the top 5; while they couldn't take on me or the Geth alone, they could be a serious threat to any of the various weak empires around them (the Volus, Snathi and Mauraders all share borders with them, all small empires of around 20 colonies with militaries of  <50 ships). This is all the more impressive because they started more or less at the dead end of one of the unfashionable spiral arms. They're now starting to press into my Eastern border, though we have good relations.

The Krynn are presently trying to build up their planets, but have over-extended for what their economy can handle. They have powerful influence, and a large, rapidly-growing population, but are trapped in a painfully unproductive recession while their population grows on all those planets. They might be at risk, given that they reside in the galactic core and are surrounded by other large territorial units (the Terrans and the Drengin with 40 planets each both border them, and only just missed top ten spots themselves, while the even more powerful Iconians are just to the south and appear to be engaged in a furious influence struggle over the few remaining colonized worlds between them), many of which are now finished expanding and have been busy teching up and arming themselves.

All in all, it's been a pretty gripping game thus far, and it continues to be even this far in. I'm wondering if it can keep it up past turn 300, when the 'victory condition' AIs kick in.

What's the difficulty setting? 

hey naselus isn't going after terraforming after factories a waste of time. Shouldn't. You fix that.

Updated to 0.9 (1.12 compatible):

Was mostly intending this to be a bug fix release, but ended up making several major changes to how the economy works. Moving hubs to flat bonuses makes them much more powerful; moving colony capital production over to manufacturing massively reduces the flexibility of low-population colonies. The removal of the basic 3 maintenance means you now get a reasonable number of planets before maintenance starts to bite. The AI seems to love the changes, tbh - it produces enough 'fixed' manufacturing not to get too badly mauled by unfortunate production wheel choices.

I would dramatically increase the costs of larger hulls, advanced weaponry/defense systems, and later-game research instead of changing upper tier building bonuses.  

As things stand now, there is effectively NO REASON to get a tier beyond level 1.  

Bug: can't change production in the economy screen.  

When I use the slider to change planets to research, all of the planets continue producing manufacturing.  

You tell me. I can't exhaustively test everything, especially with tech since there's so many trees. This is an area where I need player feedback so that I can balance them properly.

I disagree. Since manufacturing is a single-queue stat, ANY increase in the bonus is worth having until you reach the anything-in-1-turn point. This change pushes that point further on in the game. The reduction in costs, meanwhile, means they're no longer prohibitively expensive for most planets. And finally, the elimination of the colony capital production bonus has nerfed production generally, making every last point of manu/research/econ bonus more valuable.

Assembly cost WAS reduced at the same time as the growth changes came in. Synth races are doing absolutely fine; in the test games I ran for this they were regularly top 5 empires and often had very high populations compared to other races. The issues with synths were largely down to pop cap not being adjusted (which it now has been) and approval (which they no longer need to worry about).

Not a bug. Try putting some actual colonists onto a colony instead. I may nerf the manufacturing from colonial capitals, tbh; with 5 it allows even non-factory worlds to build and upgrade fairly quickly. However, I kind of like it this way. You can point a planet 100% research or econ and know that it'll still be able to churn out it's upgrades etc later on, reducing the need to endlessly micro the sliders.