The re-addition of the ideology point generating projects are already included.

The problem is those projects are down a level 5 branch that you generally don't want to get.  Those projects should be available to ANY level 5 route.  

The other option is to lower the cost of getting ideology back to normal.  With the current system getting to one branch of level 5 ideology is almost impossible.  

I might unlock them lower. I'd still like to make sure it's a solution which benefits both tall and wide reasonably equally, though.

I started playing this mod recently and I must say it is amazing. Expansion actually feels like a challenge in general, and even on an Insane-Abundant map. I no longer feel like I'll just absolutely roll the AI due handily beating them in the expansion phase, as now I'm starting to feel the effects of over expansion, as I scramble to get my wealth planets up to speed.

Thanks!

I'm about 200 turns into my first full play-through of the mod in it's current state (done soaks but not actually played end-to-end), and tbh I'm really enjoying myself. I'm third overall (against normal AIs!). While I'm still massacring them in combat, the AI seems to have gotten over it's inability to make fleets - I'm killing lots of individual ships, but it scared the crap out of me with 2 full-strength armadas coming out of nowhere... and this is a weakling civ I decided to dismember. I'm genuinely quite scared of the big empires in the middle of the galaxy; one of them just went from 30 ships to 300 in the space of about five turns...

I could really use some help, if anyone fancies it. I need to go through the techs and change all the ones which give -maintenance bonuses to buildings to give something else, as buildings don't have maintenance now. The AI is blissfully unaware of this, and still researches the crap techs; I'd like to switch the building maintenance to colony maintenance at a 5-1 exchange rate (5% reduced building maintenance = 1% reduced colony maintenance). That should make the AI even more effective.

Bump.  I'm going to keep on doing this until developers take formal note of this thread.  I'm not bumping a thread I made, so no one can accuse me of being a weirdo.  AHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!

What others call spam, I call it advertisement and marketing.  

On a more constructive note: Everyone should get ideology points through invasion as a matter of course.  The zealot super trait should TRIPLE the amount of ideology points you get through invasion.  

I've swapped all the improvement maintenance bits to colony maintenance. Haven't done the number changes; someone else will have to do that.

Thanks

EDIT: Changed the numbers myself and have added for the 0.5 release this weekend. 

Bug report: 

AI has Durantium at -117.  

Also, one of the Iridium races is pumping out huge amounts of low tier starships... but they don't have planetary invasion yet. 

Unless of course this was their plan? 

Yeah, I need to take a look at the AI weighting on tech choices; it's still largely the vanilla values.

 As to the AI having negative resources, this is fairly mysterious. I think they're allowed to upgrade without a resource check. They do this in vanilla too.

Sneak peak at the changelog for 0.5:

* Maintenance reductions from techs now apply to overall colony maintenance; effect divided by a factor of 5. With thanks to Lavo_2
* Reworked Approval. 100% approval now offers no bonuses. Less than 100% approval directly impacts on production, growth, resistance and influence at a 1-to-1 ratio - so 50% approval gives -50% production, growth, resistance and influence output.
* All growth bonuses from tech and improvements are now flat, aside from adjacency-granted ones.
* Tourism reworked. Tourist buildings now add a (very) small flat approval bonus to the whole empire.

* Tourism bonuses buffed; base tourism value reduced.

* Tourism buildings are now no longer 1-per-colony.

* Restaurant of Enternity now gives a very big (200%) tourism buff to just the planet it's on; now adds a 25% empire-wide approval multiplier.

* AI now makes more use of tourism buildings on Influence worlds; is slightly better at handling approval.

I'm hoping to firstly make approval more important for holding back 'tall' worlds, since presently they're getting a bit too powerful toward the endgame. Now that LEP is out of the way, I can pretty much just tailor approval to work as a single-build-queue restriction, which gives me free reign.

Secondly, I want to try and make tourism buildings actually USEFUL, and tourism tech LESS useful. Just rushing tourism for the free bonus cash should now be less effective, but a dedicated tourist world will not only produce a decent cash flow, but will also permit you to 'outsource' approval somewhat.

Hey naselus can you please take a look at the ancient trait? it gets really overpowered as map size increases

Already did; annoyingly, it's xml is simply calling a n effect in the C (and so isn't directly adjustable). I can switch out the effect for something else, but I've not decided what would be best yet.

ah crap

maybe just something to augment the relic existing powers by x%? 

have you changed the mod today should I redownload the mod.

Not yet. I'll probably be uploading a new one tonight; just testing the latest batch of changes to make sure they're not gonna screw anything up.

Uploaded 0.5 - Vid, I've borrowed the fix for the AI not using it's transports properly and credited you in the changelog, hope that's OK.

Will it work for 1.1?

No. Frankly, I was going to update it this week, but decided against it due to the number of bugs and general instability in 1.1, which means there's likely to be a lot of changes before it goes live. I'll only be making the mod for full release versions of the game from now on, I think.

Atrocapus Viriles (+10% growth) is a little too strong on the larger maps.  

The problem is the AI doesn't prioritize it, so as a result in the Diplomacy screen I trade useless things like Snuggler Colonies for it.  

The net result is I'm getting +120% growth thanks to having 12 of those things.  Combined with your changes to the fertility clinic and my population on many planets is growing at +1.0/turn.  

Also, change the Thalan AI to prioritize expansion + Gaia Vortex + Hyperion Matrix.  Given how powerful their tech line is for "wide" empires, they should strive to make a "wide" empire instead of focusing on research in the early game.

Also, the AI needs to prioritize MONEY more in the early game and be less willing to trade it to me (because money means I can expand faster).  

Hopefully I'm not making too many demands? 

Probably a good idea. I  am opted in and haven't had any serious issues. Most of the mods seem to work. However, they are not on the scope of yours and I doubted it would work. I look forward to trying it later.

In order to reduce growth rates it may be a good idea to add a death rate (or just negative growth rate) as well as a growth rate. Buildings like Hospitals should reduce this death rate while military-related improvements and random plague events could increase it.

Yeah, that ought to be nerfed like the others - think I mist've skipped it when I was reducing all the colony resource bonuses because % growth was rubbish then. Will knock it down to +2%.

Only real way to do that is switching them from diplomatic to expansionist. I do still need to run through all the tech trees and adjust the weights... That's not going to be a fun job.

Yes, I've noticed that the money-grubbing AIs do rather well. Though I don't mind them trading with you so much tbh - I've made the AI charge more for stuff, so it'll generally be getting a decent deal from you anyway, and once I've set about balancing the stuff on the diplo screen more effectively it shouldn't matter too much.

Yeah, I opted in to try the upgrade last night; game just crashed on building the galaxy (the worst kind of crash to debug). I figured I'm not gonna sit here figuring out how to get it working on a half-built patch that probably won't work when it comes to actual release; I will, however, continue with a 1-release-a-week cycle for the present. Expect the 1.10-compatible version to emerge the week 1.1 goes live, and then I'll start tinkering with cool new stuff from the patch the following week.

Sadly, not do-able - SD would have to add that into the schema, which we simply can't do anything about.

I've actually been playing on the 1.1 optin; the mod doesn't appear to be any less stable than vanilla.

Well, boy was I talking out my backside with this one - I can just code the xml to check for the trait and then apply something a bit more reasonable. Will tweak this for next week's release.