Yes.  So test it out.  I still haven't gotten to a proper war yet (sigh) but I have noticed the AI expanding A LOT MORE.  The mod does make the early game expansion A LOT MORE FUN because on one hand you want to expand as quickly as possible and on the other hand you don't want your econ to crash.  

Ethics? What does the word mean? I do not understand.  

EDIT: But yes, I too am happy I built my first market center a few days ago.  I have yet to build a morale building, however.  

Like i said earlier i don;t think there's any intrinsic issue with making LEp work as a concept subject to suitable modifications to the functioning and approval benefits.

Your stance on the research aspect is showing that your managing to completely miss the point of LEP. LEP isn't there to stop you building a super large empire, it's there to stop you doing so quickly.

The research penalty is there to deal with the fact that once you do get a large empire you can basically ignore research because everything becomes so super fast to research. It's not meant to stop you getting a large empire, it's meant to make the benefit of larger empires on research less linear.

Like i said earlier i'd need to sit down with a spreadsheet to work numbers to get a clear idea of exact numbers, but here's a rough idea of one possible way to do it:

Increase approval effects significantly, (i won't state numbers or methodology, not the point here).

Remove LEP from individual Colony Approval

Change the way Global Approval is calculated; Global Morale is now = (global pop + LEP)/Global Morale

No colony can have an approval greater than the Global Value

You probably could get away with a linear LEP this way, (percentage of class would probably be best but i'd have to spreadsheet it to be sure), and the LEP genuinely does limit your expansion by tanking all your worlds approval when your empire becomes overpopulated or over large, or both, but LEP no longer impacts individual colony morale. 

It also makes LEP actually grow with your empire size rather than faster than it.

The fundamental issue with LEP as implemented now is that no matter how you setup the penalty from taking one more planet only hurts new worlds hard unless it's allready hurting your empire hard. For it to work as an empire expansion slower it needs to whack your empire as a whole so that your whole empire slows down from LEP. hat requires that LEP apply in a non-colony specific way.

Except you don't want top just hit the money. You want to slow the whole thing down. Which means you need to hit manufacturing influence, grwoth, and research too.

Currently flat research, (mostly from acencion crystals), can give quite significant amounts of research even if you throw everything to wealth.

Manufacturing a bit better off in that it is more directly effected as theirs very few flat sources of it. But if one of your worlds has enough raw, well yeah.

Culture dosen't give a damm, and neithier does Growth, the later of which is espcially important to hit hard, otherwise an unstopable death spiral can develop before you realise it, and that's especially bad for the AI since it's much weorse at forward planning.

Finially by using wealth your applying an artifical cap on military size that means growing your empire curtails your military, and that's just bad period.

So, you've just admitted that the more planets you have, and more opportunity to specialize, that your version of LEP being money based can be completely nullified by late game?

Praytell, whats wrong with a PERMANENT debuff?  There are numerous ways approval LEP can be changed to lessen the impact to tall empires and more greatly punish wide ones.  With the current penalty and approval/rawproduction curve, no.

Double post, ignore.  Read the one above.  

$120 for chicken? Are you out of your mind? 

Oh, as in something to MAKE chicken food.  

Nah, eating chicken is against my religion.  

Right, few points now it's not 1am on a work night:

Which it does not do. At all. And never will. All LEP does, in it's current mechanical form, is punish the maximum extent of the empire, without in any way effecting the rate that you get there.

 

Yes. It does the same thing as LEP. Only it does it better. So LEP is basically made superfluous. 

 

 

As noted, this is basically saying you think approval-based LEP works, provided they completely change how both LEP and approval work. I do not regard this as a defense of LEP, frankly; you're actually declaring LEP to be profoundly, mechanically broken, just like we are. Also:

Is circular math, and makes no sense whatsoever. The result of the sum is attained by dividing something by the result of the sum. Your spreadsheet might have a few issues with trying to calculate that one.

Exactly correct, which is why approval was a terrible choice of mechanic to use. They chose to punish a global phenomenon using a local-only resource, so it's not like your existing worlds can take up the slack. Once again, your position is "approval-based LEP works, provided they completely change how both LEP and approval work"...

No, it doesn't. You might have to sacrifice some military early on for the sake of grabbing more worlds, but once the planets are developed they can comfortably pay for themselves.

Applying LEP to wealth rather than morale limits the rate of expansion, but does not limit maximum expansion. Approval-based LEP does exactly the inverse - it creates a set limit beyond which approval will always be zero, but has no impact on how swiftly you get there. That's the entire point. It is not fit for the purpose in it's current form, and your impassioned defense is entirely hinged on admitting completely that it's not fit for purpose.

Paul mentioned it on one of the dev streams.

Once again flat sources of research mean that beyond a certain point you don't have to dedicate any of your economy to research to still get a useful research output.

Again it fails to address growth or influence allowing you to continue hardcore culture spam (which could result in you picking up more worlds when you can't afford them), and doesn't hit growth, (which could result in approval drops you can't afford), and once again affecting monetary income intrinsically affects the maximum number of ships you can support in a negative way at a time when you want that value to be growing.

Hitting wealth isn't a cure all, sure it might limit your ability to expand and produce, but it does little beyond a certain point for your research, (it intrinsically cannot), and has inherent additional undesirable penalties to military as well as two death spiral inducing conditions and a lack of negative effect on another key attribute.

I'm sure it affects production nicely and discourages growth bey9nd a certain point but it does it in a completely undesirable way because of all the things it doesn;t do that it should and all the additional side mechanical affects that it creates that are highly undesirable.

There's a difference between something being a solution, and something being a good solution.

@Naselus: you'll get no argument from me that current LEP fails to do it's intended purpose but again your looking at the research change all wrong.

LEP is there to force limits on how fast your empire can grow wide. It's not intended to make a wide empire less powerful or advantageous. It's merely intended to limit how quickly you can achieve a wide empire. It limits the rate of growth but not the power provided by that growth.

The research change is explicitly intended to make going wide less advantageous. It limits the power provided by growth but not the rate of growth.

Compare the two bolded statements and the two italacised statments. They are not saying the same thing or anything close to the same thing. LEP limits the rate of growth, Empire Research Penalty, (lets call it REP?), is intended to make that growth less powerful.

It all comes back to the fact that no matter what you do you cannot prevent a wide empire from developing it's worlds as well as a tall empire. So going tall has no advantage to it as is now except in that a tall empire can develop those worlds more rapidly. This makes the talls advantage very transitory. An empire wide research penalty doesn't really change that in the long term, but it forces the wide empire to come much closer to the tall in overall development level to exceed it. It decreases the degree of advantage a wide empire has in research as it's the research advantage that really feeds back into a logarithmic cycle for wide empires, they get the better techs sooner increasing their empire wide output more sooner and very quickly start out-developing the tall empire via superior item access.

As for the military, that's really a two pronged issue. On the one hand there's actually quite an issue for at least warships with modules providing more power per maintenance and manufacturing point cost, and that absolutely makes large militaris cheaper to build and maintain, (especially the latter), than they should be. The AI's terrible military capabilities don't help, you just don;t need as many fleets as you should.

At the same time the moment at or just before you expand is exactly the moment the military needs to expand to cover the new growth adequately, creating a situation where someone is forced to expand before they have the military to protect it isn't good game design as your deliberately asking them to sit asses swinging in the wind begging the other guy to come hit them just to grow more powerful. Taking that kind of risk should be a choice not an enforced reality.

Once again, LEP does not, in any way, limit the rate of growth. It acts solely as an absolute limit on growth. That's all. It has no impact on how quickly you can expand. And it will NEVER impact on how rapidly you expand unless it is completely reworked, in such a way that there was no reason to use approval for it in the first place. 

The argument that having to divert lots of production away from research into wealth doesn't impact on research is ridiculous. It is essentially basing your argument on the idea that putting any production into research is unnecessary. If that is ever the case, then the mechanics which allow you to put nothing into research and still get lots of tech should be changed.

Your military argument is equally preposterous. The entire point of the mechanic is to force you to think about whether you can support and defend a new colony; to make mindlessly spamming colony ships into a sub-optimal strategy. It is about making the player make interesting choices, which Sid Meier once famously declared to be the entire point of a 4X. You have somehow managed to completely fail to understand that, and believe that making expansion always better is offering more choices than making a player genuinely think about whether he can support a new planet. It is also completely contradicted by your own stance on, well, everything else. The research penalty will force me to put more resources into research, reducing my ability to produce wealth and hurting my military. The productivity penalty from low approval not only directly reduces my cash output, but also reduces my ability to produce ships. According to your own logic, this means that using approval is worse than using maintenance. You are attempting to argue that using stacking maintenance is simultaneously too easy and too hard, which makes your entire position logically inconsistent.

The idea it doesn't effect culture is rubbish; aside from the fact that having to use more cash-generating structures directly reduces the primary source of culture (and, in fact, does far more than the tiny penalty from approval, since it attacks the base culture growth rather than only applying a % modifier), it also prevents you from just settling hundreds of unsupported planets and spamming cultural festivals.

And while you cannot prevent the wide empire from eventually developing its worlds to an equal standard as the tall empire, you can make that development slower and make the final result less effective. If the Wide empire must dedicate 50% of its planets to producing cash to pay it's maintenance, then it is not able to leverage its growth. This is achieved through the implementation of real, global negative effect, so that poorer worlds must be supported by larger worlds. Approval, as a local effect, cannot do this. This is why your own solution to LEP requires converting it into a global effect; because local effects do not work on a global scale by definition.

It's really not that hard. Approval, as a local effect which impacts on 1 build queue, is good for preventing too much power being concentrated on that one build queue. Wealth, as a global effect, is very good for preventing the proliferation of build queues. The two are not very effective at doing the other's job, without being massively reworked - at which point, they become less and less useful for doing their own. This is very, very basic game theory. It is not controversial. It has been done time and time again across dozens and dozens of games. I have not done anything particularly original by bringing it to GC3, and tbh the very idea that there's this much resistance to it is bizarre, particularly when the suggested improvements to approval-LEP require such enormous contortions to try and make it workable.

Finally, it really boils down to this: I've actually made the mod and played with both systems, and the maintenance-based system leads to a more interesting and challenging game - and not even by a small margin. Even before I implemented the AI changes, it was a better system. You have only played with an LEP system that you have outright stated should be completely redesigned from the ground up, and are simply attempting to hypothesize why a maintenance-based system wouldn't work; and most of the reasons you're coming out with are basically ridiculous. Your own proposal for replacing LEP is literally logically impossible, and you think that it's better than the present system, yet you cannot appear to grep the idea that a tried-and-proven method might be.