I have modded my planet class on my game. It is extremely easy.
I find that overall, planet classes are too low. So much land gets unused, or the continents are tiny, whatever. It just breaks it for me when I can build one food, one manufacturing, one research, one wealth, one city and the capital. Done. Oh yeah and now you have those harmony crystals... Keep it and sacrifice 17.5% of your usable land, or what? That just makes no sense to me whatsoever. Planets are BIG. I much rather play in a galaxy with rare colonizable planets and bigger ones than having 100 class 9 worlds. Less management, more efficiency, and it isn't like the AI can't handle it either.
There is also a mod that lets you use each level of terraforming more than once. I tried that, however there is no increase in construction cost, which makes it crazy easy to level your class 12 world to 35 if it has the land for it. Moreover, the AI seems to increase land ONE TILE at a time, no matter if you have 20 that are immediately terraformable (which I'm pretty sure isn't a word but whatever). This in turn handicaps the AI hugely and wrecks the difficulty completely. Although, I have to say, if a tile is of a certain quality, why WOULDN'T you be able to terraform it just like the other one of the same quality? Right? Maybe increase the construction cost by 50% for each additional tile or something, and make the AI aware of it. Until then I'm not touching that mod again.
About my mod:
The file is...
My Documents/my games/GC3Crusade/Mods/Bigger Planets/Game/GalCiv3MapDefs.xml
Its content:
I have modded my planet class on my game. It is extremely easy.
I find that overall, planet classes are too low. So much land gets unused, or the continents are tiny, whatever. It just breaks it for me when I can build one food, one manufacturing, one research, one wealth, one city and the capital. Done. Oh yeah and now you have those harmony crystals... Keep it and sacrifice 17.5% of your usable land, or what? That just makes no sense to me whatsoever. Planets are BIG. I much rather play in a galaxy with rare colonizable planets and bigger ones than having 100 class 9 worlds. Less management, more efficiency, and it isn't like the AI can't handle it either.
There is also a mod that lets you use each level of terraforming more than once. I tried that, however there is no increase in construction cost, which makes it crazy easy to level your class 12 world to 35 if it has the land for it. Moreover, the AI seems to increase land ONE TILE at a time, no matter if you have 20 that are immediately terraformable (which I'm pretty sure isn't a word but whatever). This in turn handicaps the AI hugely and wrecks the difficulty completely. Although, I have to say, if a tile is of a certain quality, why WOULDN'T you be able to terraform it just like the other one of the same quality? Right? Maybe increase the construction cost by 50% for each additional tile or something, and make the AI aware of it. Until then I'm not touching that mod again.
All you have to do is edit the GalCiv3MapDeft.xml and save it into its own mod folder. It is easy to read and edit with just notepad.
"Bigger Planets" is what I chose to call my mod. You save the file as...
My Documents/my games/GC3Crusade/Mods/Bigger Planets/Game/GalCiv3MapDefs.xml
So basically I have given a these odds to these classes:
10% to planets between classes 5 and 15
60% to planets between classes 16 and 24
20% to planets between classes 25 and 39
10% to planets between classes 40 and 60
But you can do whatever you want. There are some more data in that file, but this makes the game more fun to me.
