Given the amount of neutral mines I run across, I kinda like this idea. Helps the eco problem and doesn't feel too unbalanced. After all, that culture focus has to be good for something, right?

They are improving Advent culture in the next expansion so we will have to see.

I love this idea.

Only if you pay for the mostly useless upgrades.

Seleucia and I both realized with our mods that you have to double both the starting max allegiance cap and spread rates to make early culture as useful as trade, but late game trade will still easily out do culture, since it scales infinitely.

Exactly what military buff would that be? And the extra spread rate is almost useless, it will take quite a while for a +5% spread rate bonus to push culture back enough to affect the planet, let alone actually lower the allegiance. And the even the allegiance decrease is capped at -0.07%.

I completely agree, but unless you have a lot of high population planets in a close area, better to keep on building trade ports my friend (though I suppose nerfing it to culture/refinery levels could in theory work, that would be a big economic blow to stomach for everyone). Since like refineries there is built in maximum benefit to culture centers (when you hit the max culture bonus), building your first culture center at least should be a bit better than a tradeport. But IMO that's never true in Vanilla.

In a nutshell, culture is in practice only an economic boost that pays for itself slower than trade ports. It either needs to be a true jack of all trades like you say, a better economic booster, or as in my Enhanced 4X Mod both.

Not to mention that if the Advent culture keeps taking it back, it's only a minor harassment. Other forces would still be urged to assault or produce counter culture.

But you need to research the culture upgrades, which was my point. The base culture gives no military bonuses (only in my mod it does).

Here are my thoughts:

1) A general culture buff favors Advent...give each culture tech a max allegiance bonus (which will accumulate to a greater bonus for Advent)

2 ) Have that tier 1 research tech give a cost reduction to technologies

3)  Have communal labor give a credit cost decrease for all purchases instead of its lame bonus

There are other things that can be done but those are the easiest...

A build rate bonus is not a very good bonus...the only time that type of bonus is useful is if you have to rush build many tactical structures in a very short period of time...that's a pretty limited advantage and is easily overshadowed by cheaper structures...

That you aren't likely to have more than 2 constructors any way makes the opportunity cost of researching that tech unjustified...

Well, the build rate times for civilian structures are on the order of less than a minute...a trade port has a build time of 50s on slow game speed....a 100% bonus to structure build rate would halve that time, so you would be earning trade income 25s earlier....

Let's just ballpark it and say that trade port is getting 1.75 credits per second (trade length = 10), and so in 25 seconds you would get 43.75 more credits than you would otherwise, which really doesn't amount to much...

To put that into perspective, communal labor is about 600 + 4.5 x 150 = 1275 credits (which in this distorted case would be equal to about 2 x the 43.75 credit bonus)...

More realistically, you don't have a trade length of 10 all the time and the bonus is more like 33%, which means you aren't paying off this technology any time soon...

Specifically for trade ports, there is the extra consideration for trade ports that expand your trade length (since you also get the bonus to all trade ports a little bit earlier)...additionally, faster speed increases income rates by more than it increases build rates (which should favor this tech)...still though, I'm not seeing the economic payoffs in this tech...

I'd think all the time...isn't that TEC technology at 16.67% per level?  A single logistics upgrade gets you a 2nd constructor, putting you at 33% with communal labor.  And the Vasari tech is 40% per level but is tier 6 or 7...so I'd agree it's better than TEC and even say it's better than Vasari's comparable technology as well...

OP:

This idea wouldn't change the advent's game much.  This would only free up some micromanagement later on in the game, which in my view should never happen since neutrals should always be contestable.  You will actually take away some of the fun of the game because of this. 

Advent need an early game edge that doesn't require a lot of investment, much like the vasari and TEC.  I would say this would be easily done via research additions in the low tiers.  I would be for adding more useful low level economic research to advent giving them an advantage.

Advent suffer from a lack of OPTIONS.  Give them more options and you will see skilled players using them in multiplayer.

I agree with Seleuceia, that Advent's Communal Labor build rate bonus is not a very good bonus, or as he put it earlier: outright "lame".

The only time the bonus is useful is in fact a very short time, when the drones are under attack.  The build rate bonus is just not enough to make a difference, and not worth researching the tech.