It will work, but like you said it will be a logistic nightmare, more than 20 planets and you start to go crazy, I personally like few habitable planets, but I am a freaf about micromanagement.

Ok thanks.

I am currently finishing a gigantic game with abundant everything, and loose clusters. I own about 35-40% of the galaxy now, but I litterally have over 250 planets under my control. Not a single race has fewer than 20-25, while the big ones have around 50-100. It is insane, but you get a lot of really cool ships. I have about 20 fleets of 7 huge ships, and at least a dozen fleets of smaller ships. (log capability = 46) So while it was very tedious to begin with, it can be pretty fun later on because you have to much manufacturing power. (And research and cash, and really everything.)

In my game, (settled) planet quality gradually increased over the course of time. I had the Planet Quality racial trait on (Green Thumb), I don't know if that made a difference.

There were also a few events that upped the PQ of a bunch of the planets in the system. Once the Thalians stumbled on a Precursor device that made every planet in their 5-planet system jump to class 11 planets (every single one - I later invaded and found out first-hand). And before that the Drengins discovered something that made each of their unsettled planets (ie, the class 0's) into class 5's.

I wish you could do something with at least some of the Class 0 planets. Say be able to "explore" them with the idea being that you could possibly discover an ancient ruin or new species/ ecosystem which would benefit your Faction in some way.
Also for Class 0's, say be able to establish an outpost on some of them. For instance be able to build a "Science Outpost" on a Mercury class planet to study sunspots, which would then benefit your research capabilities in certain areas.


D

Having few habitable planets is an advantage to gameplay, not a hinderance. It's done for competition reasons:
1)Having few habitable planets means you have to explore to expand.
2)Competition for good planets will increase, and pretty soon any empty planet looks good.
3)With the habitable planets spread out, it is much less likely that condensed sections of space will become totally dominated by one race early on.
4)It forces you to meet your neighbors and deal with them, one way or another.
5)It slows progress through a game.

CoReD: They do, they just might become habitable if a certain randon event happens. A 0 went to 15 when the Vegans took over for me.

Besides, you wouldn't want the AI to out settle you, now would you? They just might, and if so... *plays ominous music*

[If you want most of the worlds you find to be habitable, set number of planets down to "Occasional" or whatever is "Normal" and set the number of habitable planets to "Abundant" - most star systems will have 2-3 planets and most of those planets will be above class 0. ]

This is what I did also in my latest game. 7AI and myself playing on huge galaxy map. I got tired of every star system having 5 planets each, didn't seem realistic. So, I also used the occassional planets with abundant habitability. I also use the scattered star system common stars.

Everyone in the game got a bunch of planets, I got 14 and the majority of the others got 12-16 with only one race only getting 2 planets, have no idea why they didn't expand. But, this is a great map which has lots of habitibale planets and I'm really going to have fun surviving in this one. Normal difficulty as well. There's even 3 or 4 minors with of course their own planet as well. And many of these planets are huge 9+ are most of my planets, though I did grab one 7 planet cause the AI was expanding like a jack rabbit with it's colony ships into my part of space. lol Even got one that plopped a colony in the same star system as my CAPITAL!! It was a 4 planet and I wasn't going to waste an early colony ship on a pos 4 level planet. I may pay for that later on. Haha

Well, if one race got the "Eden Device" very early on, they would quickly win culturally due to population size. Being able to convert Class 0's just wouldn't work with the current ability to win by influence.

howabout making the "Eden Device" a galactic wonder, but instead of it being a social improvement it should be a ship, hmm perhaps the terror star should make a return...

I wonder why noone's ever made wonders be units as well as buildings in civ games

I had a random event where the Yor found a device that increased the planet rating of all 0 planets WITHIN 2 SECTORS of the planet it was found on by.....


.... 9 !

Needless to say i started buying colony ships right away. It was pretty sick, 7 solar systems with 3-5 inhabited planets each

Bah, I'm sorry for double posting.. I thought my post didn't get through x.x;