Stalker0

Join Date 04/2009

+60

5.83 Benevolent + Influence still OP

Thought this one deserved its own thread. I know influence received some nerf in 5.83, but either it or benevolent needs another hit with the bat.

Won a culture game as Terrans on a medium map by turn 105 against gifted AIs, and it was cake.

I was locked in the corner as Terran with only 4 planets to my name. 6th in power, I was not too impressive. I got the missionary buildings to start building up some influence, then got the 100% bonus to my homeworld's influence.

BAM! 3/4 of the map was Terran blue in an instant. I didn't even have any influence bonus or influence starbases on my homeworld except the missionary building (near the end I slapped on the entertainment capital as well for a big boost). I did have one of my planet's that I had specialized in influence.

Then I got the next benevolent ideology, and suddenly nearly every starbase and planet within eye shot was mine. Honestly though getting the planets was a nice touch, but they were going to fall like dominos anyway....the starbase pickup was the nicest part.

A simple 10 turns later it was all over.

1) The 100% homeworld bonus is just too strong. No one could fight my influence, except by taking the malevolent ideology that prevents flips (and honestly an ideology that completely stops a game mechanic is a bad idea imo).

2) The timing of this is very arbitrary because of the way ideology points work right now. If I could have snagged 2 more planets early on, I would have gotten to do the 100% bonus a good 20 turns earlier (10 benevelont points per planet, +10 per missionary built on that planet).

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Frogboy

Join Date 03/2001

+2424

Good points!

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They need to find a way to scale it to map size. I am playing an immense game just to test the influence factors. I have been putting Missionaries on nearly all planets and I have 5-6 culture relics being mined. Playing as Terran Benevolent since getting the 2 module pragmatic bonus.

I am at about T125 and I have flipped one Thalian colony that they were dumb enough to put right by a far better planet. In other words, they built it in my ZOC, I did not expand to flip them.

There has been no extraordinary culture expansion.

Edit: I happened to think, if they can give you various levels of research progress, why not the same kind of option for influence

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Same. On Excessive, Influence has very little effect. Especially if you want to play with Uncommon or Rare Habitable Planet settings.

It's obvious these kind of setting make Influence expansion extremely difficult. But I would like to see modifiers for Habitable Planet setting, as well as world size.

I have a feeling once Influence is nerfed, it'll only be viable on the smaller half of map sizes.

It will take some serious scaling to make it viable on Excessive and Insane, as even in its currently considered(by most) OP state, it's not really viable now.

Edit: I also play a Iridium Corporation, and all our unique Influence buildings have no adjacency bonuses(due to bug), so they're like 3x less powerful.(No fix as of 5.3)

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Chiming in to say on Excessive I have done the same thing with Benevolent and I am mining 3 Culture resources AND dropped 3 or 4 Culture star bases. My borders have not moved much nor am I acquiring any planets.

Culture issue is NOT an issue on LARGE maps and needs to scale a bit better. I want to be able to win a Culture victory so we should NOT be penalized if we pursue that victory route.

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Won a culture game as Terrans on a medium map by turn 105 against gifted AIs, and it was cake.

Another vote for serious re-balancing of influence. The Benevolent perks should be cut by a factor of 10, IMO. I generally follow the Benevolent path with some Malevolent thrown in. I avoid taking the Influence perks until last because that is not the way I like to win games. Even without taking the influence perks, on an insane map, any power that settles within my sphere of influence might as well just hand their world over to me. This isn't fun, it is too easy to do, and other powers don't even get mad when I start flipping their worlds (they should, IMO). A culture victory should be just as hard to win as any other type of victory, and as others have said, influence needs to scale with map size. As always, my opinions.

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Even without benevolence culture is incredibly over powered and not retaliated against by the AI.

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Taslios

Join Date 11/2002

+74

This is again another reason to untie Ideology from colonization effects and to balance the results based on map size.

Influence barely does anything now on huge or larger maps. but on small and medium maps it is over powered.

I second the vote to remove the "you are so evil your planets don't flip" with a "your plantets gain 2x more resistance to culture flips. Don't make them immune.. just make them very resistant.

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I think the problem is that the +100% ideology perk doubles existing influence, not just influence growth. So it doubles all influence growth for your homeworld since the game began. Not sure that is wad, as it is OP.

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One of the big problems with it is that you don't need high level buildings to actually shove your way across the galaxy.

The Benevolent ideology traits really are massive flips, and likely bugged a bit. Not to mention that it should not be based upon influence built up, but rather influence currently being produced. Currently, it leads to situations where you can spam up influence to say, 1000, then delete all of the base influence and float along on +% of the total generated influence.

Range of influence should really be better limited by buildings. Later game buildings should be what you need to reach across the galaxy, rather than locally.

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