I just had a other game and stripped all planets after exploring it the first I got hte artifect the second I didn't, the first was next to a planet and might have been in my culture but the second definatly wasn't. (4-5 planets away). So the keeping of artifacts may just be a bug. shame I was hoping that was the case.
I had 2 planets and a stroid whit that once and I kept one so maybe it is treu. woud be nice to see it in the tooltip thou. doesn't solve the diplomacy. Woud be nice to see something to help out whit that, the simpelest thing I can think of is to have your phase stabilazers act as a 2 way envoy when placed, or one way if theres a easy way to get them whitout a planet.
I noticed my AI allie sends it's envoys to planets I used to have, if I give him a quest to send a envoy to one of my planets he sends one to it to get the job done and sends it away to one of hte other planets I stripped. Coud just be whit stripping planets but I noticedm y enemies sending envoys to me as wel from time to time, makes it imposabel to get pacts when your playing whit AI.
I played around whit the loyalist and I feel like I need to keep planets for diplamacy and artifacts, kinda ruins the point of going mobile when you have to run back to defend your own planets. I just do comp stomps so hard to say how things are against players but I like it alot so far, appart from thoes 2 things.
