That *is* a strange result. Bonus tiles are calculated as a percentage of overall tiles rounded down, the exact percentage depending on the planet type. Thus PQ ability can either increase the number of bonus tiles, or more often have no effect. It can *never* decrease the number of bonus tiles. And it doesn't in my game. (10% bonus with Thalans for example...you still have 2 bonus tiles)

Can you doublecheck? I've never seen any problems like this with the bonus tiles before (and I did a fair bit of testing to work out how it all worked). Perhaps what you're finding is a bug in the neutral alignment bonus?

I have had a bit of a different problem but it is related.

I created a tech that gave a 15% PQ bonus if researched. So on average each planet that I controled would increase by 2-3 PQ wich would be awesome later in the game when everything is built up. When I researched it it did not work. So I don't think that it is percentage base counted wich I think isn't right. I also double checked and all of my coding for that tech is correct...

I retried it about 4 times, and got same results. Note that I think I was using a Tiny universe for all of them, and have noticed some changes when I put it up to Gigantic. However, it seems consistent when the game settings don't change: I still only get 1 bonus tile per level on the homeworld when using PQ+ bonuses. I think the homeworld has some constants, and the homeworld is modified in some way by the PQ+ bonus but that it's consistent for the homeworld at least. The secondary planet does seem to have some variance in its bonus tiles (when I tested races that have two planets; but then again you don't actually start with that colony, so its stats could change from game to game).

My theory was that for PQ 1-9, they get 0-1 tiles per level, and for PQ 10-19, they get 1-2 tiles. I haven't tested this, but it's a gut feel from my experience with planets so far. It's possible that the PQ+ bonus changes the "tile bonus class" of the planet in some way despite the increased PQ.

My suggestion to the developers would be to do something like this: Store planet base PQ, planet terraformed PQ, planet current bonus PQ in separate variables rather than simply change the actual PQ. Keeping the true base as a separate variable and making others for modifications and bonuses would help stop the PQ problems that I have read about, assuming that the tile count on the planet are supposed to always match the PQ value (which is intuitive I guess). Then the planet has race-independent stats which are the same no matter how many times it changes hands.

Example:
Base PQ: 10
Terraform PQ: +2 per level
Terraform Level: 2
Colony Bombardment Penalty (from wars): -3
Current Natural PQ: 10 + (2 x 2) - 3 = 11
Race Bonus: +10% = +1
Current PQ: 12
Number of Tiles: 12 (same as PQ)

Perhaps when it changes hands via conquest then it reverts back to its natural PQ? Also, I think it should be possible to repair damage from conquest via a building like terraforming to bring the planet back to its natural PQ, but it should cost a moderate amount to do so. This means that damage is temporary, but that if you conquer a planet with a PQ-damaging effect then you have to spend time to clean up the mess. (In Master of Orion, you had industrial waste which would reduce the quality of planets, but if you cleaned it up, it would return to its original state. That was the concept I was thinking of).

I did it without Neutral alignment and found similar results.

Using version 1.2 Here are some screenshots of the game settings. Note that when I use PQ bonus abilities, I only get 1 yellow tile on the planet, but normally I would get 2. I've tested multiple times and I get the same result no matter how I go about upgrading those tiles. This only seems to happen when using this race which starts with a PQ 15 planet. Others with 10 PQ planets don't seem to experience this problem. All I can think of is that the planet type is fixed and the bonus tiles are different for a PQ 10-15 planet than for a PQ 16-20 planet.

That is very weird. I don't know why you're getting different results to me, unless they changed the way it worked in 1.2, but then I didn't see a mention of it in the changelog. Your explanation makes sense, it just doesn't work like that in the current beta or the earlier versions I tried it with. In those cases the PQ bonus doesn't change the planet type even when it moves the planet outside its usual class range, so Thala still gets 2 bonus tiles in the 16-18 range. By the way, you can test more precisely where the bonus tile thresholds are by editing the raceconfig file. This allows you to give any PQ bonus you like, even into the 1000s of percent.