And he wonders why he can't get 'positive reviews' on Steam.

My thoughts.

A new larger DLC should be focused on Diplomacy, Cultural and Trade. And in order to make these influences more valid War have to change.

Each war have to fill a purpose, these ever going wars between civilisations that can´t reach each others has to go. Is the war to curb the Drengin perhaps the reason for war is to decrease their military strength with 25 %. Perhaps a reason for war is to eliminate one cultural space station, when it is gone it should be way easier to make Peace. Et cetera.

This also means that raiding a border and attacking a ship should not be an automatic declaration of war. There are many reasons for a civilisation to not start a war because one ship gets shot down. There are several spy planes shot down during the Cold war but no side wanted to start hostilities.  

Cold war has to be an option. You should be able to wage diplomatic, cultural and trade war agains your arch nemesis. But not military war. The trade war could be made through third persons. But also by using pirates. Remove the space psychopaths that are there now and exchange them with a modifier that hurts trade income per hex affected. Make it possible to divert fundings to enhance and create pirate areas in the enemy territory. To lessen the pirates you have to divert military fleets to the area who dampens the pirate modifier within their sector range. Only a fleet with an individual within it have the possibilty to find the secret hidden pirate base. To eliminate the pirate threat the pirate base has to be taken out.

Alliances needs one extra layer, the possibility to make an Alliance organisation (NATO, Warsaw pact). Being part of an Alliance organisation should meant that you have to divert some ships to them, but on the other hand so does all other members. These Alliance organisation fleets should be controlled by the leader of the organisation and have logistics +xx to make them something worth working for. 

It should be possible to use the three influences to affect other civilisations choices. Make them become more hostile towards other civilisations, make them start wars you know the basic stuff. But also make it possible to use your influences to stop ongoing wars you are not involved in. If one of your smaller allies are involved in a war against some other weak civilisation you are trading with. You should be able to bring them to peace talks. 

Your civilizations outlook as good , neutral or evil should be affected by diplomatic and trade choices. If you make a trade deal that is more profitable to the other side you become more good. If you use your military strenght to push other civilizations into bad trade deals you become more evil.

Not sure why you need to cap cities? I would think you should solve the underlying problem rather than start adding hard caps. Might as well put in a max number of planets I can control as well....

Going on what another said about pirates (or even minor civs - give them a reason to be around) you could higher contracts to attack other civs?

Should be simple:

• Talk with pirate 
• Select harass contract
• select target faction (they then declare ware on them).
  • You already have code in game to allow me to talk another faction into going to war against another faction, so just make it so this is something you can do with pirates and/or minor Civs.

Because we have a toxic community?

I like it. This game needs some stability in the mechanics, so we can learn how to use the new features, like cities. And we don't need another wheel/no wheel.

Factories can be balanced with mods. To make them important again, give them a unique adjacency bonus, like manufacuring and research. Or every factory adds 0.1 movement (10 = +1). Or whatever. 

Like at the moment, only farms and cities I find absolutely no good. Factories, laboratories and more simply create more variety.
So here's my suggestion.

1 to 2 cities per planet are very good
factories and laboratories etc. as usual
A differentiated compilation of improvements is just more fun.

In general, less powerful interventions in the game, turning around 180 degrees is simply too stupid.
Then why not a DLC?
New breed, new features, new buildings, new events and yes, also a new balancing... as DLC, so switchable.

Suggestions for DLC:

"Great Inventions" some really rough stuff, engines, jumping gantries, plants, weapons and buildings. You get them in a combination of research, settlement and discovery. They are "only" 20% more powerful than existing things.

"big bandits" pirates in league with pushers and crooks... mafia that spread out until they're killed. So you get a reward for example a great shipyard, a prototype ship, which you can cannibalize and get a special technology.
A special capability for ground troops could also come here.

Since my English is bad, I left the translation to deepl. com/translate. Seems to fit so far:)

Greeting Rainer

While I sympathize with the feeling that your ideas are being attacked simply for being different from what other people have already suggested, I think that there is a disconnect between what you have envisioned as the proper balance and how people want to be able to build their specific empires. I am not a mathematician, but the sense that I have from reading the boards is that cities have the best opportunity cost in pretty much all scenarios, and anything less is limiting yourself. I see similar discussions on MMO boards about Max DPS. The point of the game is for players to build the most powerful empire they can, and will pretty much always seek to exploit an obvious route to that power. Simply removing the opportunity via hard caps instead of trying to find a way to change that route to something that requires more specific choice seems like a wasted opportunity to me. I've had so much fun playing this game that I KNOW you guys can do better than that. Your team has made an awesome game that I've played for almost 1700 hours to this point (according to Steam).

That being said, has any thought been given to making the city bonuses +1 to each instead of +2, and have the more specific factories/markets/research buildings be +2 adjacency? Since the goal (as I see it) for cities are to be hubs, that means they should be useful when 4 or more tiles are connected to each other. While they should be able to be placed anywhere the player chooses, that would allow for mixed use sections to be their most efficient use for the competitive types. I don't have the math to back it up, but that seems like it would be a good starting point.

Debate is painful sometimes, but it's one of the things I really enjoy about these boards when the personal attacks don't come around.

I like the idea of incrementing food on a planet with more than one city. I do think all hubs should have better adjancencies than justuildings.

Interesting. and because you can "Farm" Arnor spice with the right tech, that's a not a blocker. Sounds like it's a worthy option.

Heh, you could be mean and use antimatter for Research- that'd put a nice, hard choice between building all those ships with prototype engines, or with better missiles or the peaceful pursuit of science. 

Limiting each planet to 2 cities will 'force' us to  build other improvements after we max out our population. This doesn't actually make Factories more desirable, but it does make Food and Morale less important.

We can calculate our manufacturing as:
( Construction + Raw Production ) * (1 +% Bonuses)

In the early game, increasing Construction and Raw Production will always be better, but once those numbers are high enough, then % Bonuses become very important.

For 3 Factories to be competitive with a City and 2 Farms, it needs to produce at least as much Construction as a City provides Raw Production.

I'd suggest 1 +0.5/Level Construction per Factory (The same as Space Elevators). This would give you 6 Construction from 3 Factories, which is not too overpowered compared to 4 Raw Production. This would also then make % bonuses more relevant because of higher Construction values. At some point, you will want those % bonuses, instead of more flat bonuses (assuming that the % bonuses are high enough).

Regarding cities/food why not tie this back to moral as it was in Galactic Civilizations II?  the more people you have the more entertainment buildings you need so no hard cap but, it limits itself by not having enough things to do to keep people happy?