3rd Party Empire Stealing (Colonizing) Planet During War

[Cagliostro]

I'd like to be able to pay influence to mark a system as 'mine' which would increase the cost of colonising there by the amount of influence spent. There would be a diminishing effect over distance from the system, so that nearby systems cost more too.

If it also acted as a diplomatic 'warning' to civilizations that were friendly to you or terrified of you, that would work pretty well.

 

[Riftwalker]

I don't entirely disagree with your claim beacon idea, but the "dibs" system is pretty much already included in the border range concept. That's what your area of influence is supposed to represent. And that third party got smart/lucky and snatched a world from the big players. Gotta say I like the emergent storytelling in that ...

I will say though, influence is a ludicrously unbalanced resource, which by extension makes claiming territory a bit wonky. As a democratic government I'm generally running over my influence cap due to Mandates, but as oligarchies and autocracies I'm barely scraping by. Getting influence from rivalries is either a huge risk or nearly pointless - either half the galaxy bands together against you, or you're rivaling pathetic empires that give you 0.01 influence per month. And all that makes expansion super slow, unless you're either a democracy or very effective at conquest. If you're both, you expand way too fast.

Sorry, getting off topic there, but TL/DR: I think the situation that happened to you is annoying, yes, but I'd prefer to keep the option in the game - have used it myself once or twice. As for claiming worlds, I think influence and the cost of frontier outposts needs to be rebalanced soon.

I wish that borders with nations that have poor relations with woudl actually bleed into each other. You could make an agreement to reset the bleeding, but nations might not be likely to accept unless they're much weaker than you, you could also maybe agree with the other that it's a "neutral zone" and this would freeze the bleed, and cause neither nation to have military access there, but it would remove the border friction malus to relations. Maybe even for the extra mile allow you to draw borders with someone causing them to freeze regardless of your border pressure and this would remove border friction malus as well.

 

[B3ndolf]

i'm sorry but i really dont see the problem here, you made a choice to prioritise your resources into the war effort rather than colonising the planet or building an outpost and someone else got it first, annoying yes but not a problem with the game. personally i dont want them to remove interesting choices with consequences like this from the game.

i dont think we need another way to claim planets other than border extrusion and outposts those work fine as they are most of the suggestions here would just confuse the AI in all likely hood.

influence gain is being completely reworked in the next expansion anyway with it coming from factions as well so hopefully influence gain will be more balanced anyway.

that said i wouldnt be opposed to being able to claim outposts as war goals, that makes sense as you are essentially claiming territory off another empire although i could see players exploiting it by deleting outposts an enemy has set as a wargoal if they think they will lose, more of a problem for multiplayer i guess but still a problem for single player on occasion.

 

[TheCrimsonMajor]

i'm sorry but i really dont see the problem here, you made a choice to prioritise your resources into the war effort rather than colonising the planet or building an outpost and someone else got it first, annoying yes but not a problem with the game. personally i dont want them to remove interesting choices with consequences like this from the game.

The problem is the double energy drain of having your fleet away from orbit of a home planet and having a colony ship/colony in development. Especially for an autocracy, losing that much energy at once can easily land you in a crisis. Also, the only time I could colonize this planet was when I was at war, and it's location was in the middle of a war zone, so to speak. So, it's not as if I could have obtained it any other way.

On top of all of that, I end the war with a truce with the master of the 3rd party vassal who stole the planet, so I have to wait 10 years to obtain the planet that was the entire reason for the war in the first place.

I think, somewhere in that chain of events, there's a problem.