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[forsaken1111]

I guess influence might be more of a bottleneck if you play with a less densely populated galaxy so you’re constantly building outposts, rather than the early scramble to stake territory and take chokepoints before the borders solidify

That might be actually. I play with empire populations maxxed out so I don't actually need to expand for long before running into other empires.

[BurnedToast]

The truces between wars give me plenty of time to make new claims on the enemy. Perhaps you're claiming too much each war?

My current game (that I've given up in frustration) I've conquered literally 100% of the enemy's empire. I own every planet, every outpost, everything - he has been effectively eliminated from the game completely and I don't think my war attrition is even counting down anymore (or if it is, it's very slow). In addition to that I've also ~50% dominated the ally he invited to the war, and the only thing that stopped me was boredom (his fleets have been long since smashed).

Despite that, I've managed to set claims on less than 25% of his systems.

So by paradox's standards I'm trying to "claim too much" I suppose, but really? He's so utterly and completely beaten he is never, ever coming back in any way. How does forcing him to stay in the game keep it interesting, and how is making me beat him up over and over every 10 years fun?

I guess influence might be more of a bottleneck if you play with a less densely populated galaxy so you’re constantly building outposts, rather than the early scramble to stake territory and take chokepoints before the borders solidify

I'm playing 100% standard settings for large spiral galaxy on "commodore" difficulty. The AIs all just gave up and stopped expanding at some point (probably because it wastes all it's influence claiming MY systems that it will never have a chance to capture) so there's tons and tons of open space to grab.

Base game I think I got outpost costs down to like ~20. Only really became a problem when I went to war and had to make claims, since I had to stop making outposts during that time.

Pretty sure you need (fanatic) xenophobe or one of the "total war" civs to get it this low. Without those, you can stack reach for the stars (-10%) and interstellar dominion (ascension perk, -20%) to reduce the cost to 52.5 and that's it, there are no other reductions.

[forsaken1111]

To be fair I also play with a shit ton of mods so its possible one of them is sorting out the influence gain curve. I've only played a few unmodded games since the 2.0 update. In my current game though I am perpetually capped on influence because I have no need or desire to expand. My neighbors are peaceful and I am happily teching through the midgame.

[Teneb]

There was a recent dev diary with some interesting stuff. I am not going to copy the whole thing over, but highlights are:

-Space Creature research is being remade. Now you can either choose to hunt them, getting a damage buff against them, or study them, resulting in stuff like the current system, or, in a few cases, try to tame/co-exist with them, resulting in components and such. Pet space amoebas when?

-All strategic resources will be visible from the start, but most will require tech to be exploited. This is nice.

-A mid-game tech has been added which allows science ships to use... the old warp drives. Yup. You need to have revealed the target system through sensor range at some point, and it won't work with special stuff like the upcoming L-Cluster.

[Il Palazzo]

The truces between wars give me plenty of time to make new claims on the enemy. Perhaps you're claiming too much each war?

My current game (that I've given up in frustration) I've conquered literally 100% of the enemy's empire. I own every planet, every outpost, everything - he has been effectively eliminated from the game completely and I don't think my war attrition is even counting down anymore (or if it is, it's very slow). In addition to that I've also ~50% dominated the ally he invited to the war, and the only thing that stopped me was boredom (his fleets have been long since smashed).

Despite that, I've managed to set claims on less than 25% of his systems.

So by paradox's standards I'm trying to "claim too much" I suppose, but really? He's so utterly and completely beaten he is never, ever coming back in any way. How does forcing him to stay in the game keep it interesting, and how is making me beat him up over and over every 10 years fun?

I kinda like that mechanics, actually.
Conceptually, it makes you feel more like you're leading an empire of many citizens, who have something to say about what they deem ok for the government to do (that's why you spend 'influence' influencing your citizens). Same as you can't wage war against just anybody you want in CKII.
If I want to play a game without such hurdles, I pick a devouring swarm race.

[Zanzetkuken The Great]

There was a recent dev diary with some interesting stuff. I am not going to copy the whole thing over, but highlights are:

-Space Creature research is being remade. Now you can either choose to hunt them, getting a damage buff against them, or study them, resulting in stuff like the current system, or, in a few cases, try to tame/co-exist with them, resulting in components and such. Pet space amoebas when?

-All strategic resources will be visible from the start, but most will require tech to be exploited. This is nice.

-A mid-game tech has been added which allows science ships to use... the old warp drives. Yup. You need to have revealed the target system through sensor range at some point, and it won't work with special stuff like the upcoming L-Cluster.

I wonder if that new jump tech will have some interesting consequences associated with it.  After all, you can't expect everything to remain nice and neat if you are going down unstable routes.

[Egan_BW]

You know, I like the idea of having an alternative to using the hyperspace lanes that you could use... it just might drive your entire fleet insane. Or throw them 200 years into the future. Or turn your ships into space amoebas...

[CaptainArchmage]

I guess influence might be more of a bottleneck if you play with a less densely populated galaxy so you’re constantly building outposts, rather than the early scramble to stake territory and take chokepoints before the borders solidify

That might be actually. I play with empire populations maxxed out so I don't actually need to expand for long before running into other empires.

Influence does limit your expansion, it represents political and diplomatic capital. I'm getting about +3 in my Boatmurdered 2200 playthrough. There used to be techs increasing it but those have been switched over to providing unity, which is like a different kind of civics-building resource. It's somewhat more desirable than having to spend influence to colonize planets though.

Influence will be a problem on big galaxies, and I play on 1000-star ones. The trouble is influence does not scale with galaxy size, so a "big" empire in a small galaxy will have an easier time filling up space than a "big" empire in a full size one. The further you expand, the more systems you have to claim (with outposts) to expand your radius of influence (systems to claim squares with distance). Any conventional empire will slow down expansion of its bubble because of this, either spending influence on outposts or claims.

I haven't gotten a hold of how the AI scales in terms of results (not on the scaling difficulty, talking Ensign-Grand Admiral ones) so I'm playing it safe (maxed out empires, habitable planets, primitives, etc.), I might have to edit the difficulty upwards though (as a rule of thumb, AI are almost always given a resource and power bonus to scale difficulty but I do not know if this expands to influence). I'd played a game back in 1.8 and while the colony system was hell (influence for colonization, maaaan) the influence blobbing was easier... had covered a decent part of the galaxy by 2300-2320 (with hyperdrives, other empires had different FTL methods though). If you had democratic government, you also got influence from fulfilling mandates (lots of it, every ten years or less), but that's been changed to unity. I did manage to get a lot of influence uplifting pre-sentients though and that's how I got by - 500 influence per uplift gave enough to colonize about five planets. If it still gives influence in 2.0 that would be great, allow about 6-60+ systems to be outposted/uplift depending on what the cost reduction you have is.

There was a recent dev diary with some interesting stuff. I am not going to copy the whole thing over, but highlights are:

-Space Creature research is being remade. Now you can either choose to hunt them, getting a damage buff against them, or study them, resulting in stuff like the current system, or, in a few cases, try to tame/co-exist with them, resulting in components and such. Pet space amoebas when?

-All strategic resources will be visible from the start, but most will require tech to be exploited. This is nice.

-A mid-game tech has been added which allows science ships to use... the old warp drives. Yup. You need to have revealed the target system through sensor range at some point, and it won't work with special stuff like the upcoming L-Cluster.

Unlike warp drives, there isn't a range limit and you can "go anywhere" as long as it is to a system there's some intel on (have visited before). If you have intel on a spot on the other side of a 1000 star galaxy, you can go there in one jump without interception or worrying about space borders. It's also only for science ships.

Ok, so I picked the psionic weapon as my choice of planetkiller... amd NOW I've found that it's not a psychic dominator at all, it just makes people more spiritual. Can I salvage this somehow and get some other PK weapon?

You can apparently refit the planetkiller, if you have the tech for it. You might have to wait for it to show up in a research tree though.

[Zanzetkuken The Great]

I'm guessing you would want something like this incorporated into the game?  Basically, a starbase bottom row building that provides +0.3 influence, though has to be built on citadels.

[Egan_BW]

I have to question how it can be justified in-universe that you can fit a science ship with magical FTL drives that are strictly better than any other option but are physically incapable of putting them on warships.

[Dorsidwarf]

The warp cores are actually just a Scottish wizard who refuses to work on a ship carrying weapons

[Zanzetkuken The Great]

I have to question how it can be justified in-universe that you can fit a science ship with magical FTL drives that are strictly better than any other option but are physically incapable of putting them on warships.

Might be all the power that would otherwise go to weapons is going to a monstrous sensor bank required combined with increasing size making it exponentially harder.  Science ships are the only ones with the power to sensor to mass ratio possible to pull it off.

[Egan_BW]

Then stick some guns to your science ship design, and bam, you've got a weak but mobile warship.

[Draignean]

Then stick some guns to your science ship design, and bam, you've got a weak but mobile warship.

It would be kind of nice if they allowed it to be fitted onto warships with special hull selection and/or a massive hit to power. That way if you want your fleet of harassers, you know they're going to be weaker than any other ship of the same class.

[CaptainArchmage]

Then stick some guns to your science ship design, and bam, you've got a weak but mobile warship.

It requires a specific technology to do, and is similar to the "emergency FTL jump" option that causes the fleet to go missing for a few months and appear at one of your planets, with a good chance several ships will be lost.

The science ships are pretty weak and even if they were armed, they would not last long.