I agree that the balance between naturally occurring and synthesised 'rare' resources is off - I'd personally balance it by having more multiple natural 'rare' resources, and perhaps more uses for them in components and/or buildings. They don't currently get used in techs, afaik, and I don't really see how or why they should?
I sort-of agree on the need for more uses for food and consumer goods; in my current playthrough I've been able to get my pop growth on some planets to pretty crazy levels by having 'encourage growth' edicts (1000 food a pop), plus having 'nutritional plenitude' food policy since day 2; that sort of works to contain the food stockpile within the cap, but I struggled with what to do with consumer goods. Latest solution was to give better living standards, but that only cut down the surplus into a deficit for a while. Still, since, as you say, it's effectively a trade off against having more alloys, it sort of works, in my view - it'd just be good to have more to do with it. Personally, I'd have made pop 'upgrading' use consumer goods - say, 10 to progress from worker to specialist, and perhaps 50 or 100 to progress from specialist to ruler, - with the option to turn off automatic upgrades (on a per-planet basis) for those who like micromanagement (and for the parts of the game where not having thousands of CGs in the stockpile is an issue).
I actually like the new piracy system, but wish a) it was more clearly explained, so that I didn't have to work out that
- piracy max is a quarter of all the trade passing through the system
- current piracy protection + suppression level being below the maximum piracy level causing pirates to appear (eventually!)
- piracy suppression of fleets being below max piracy in a system not actually reducing piracy levels - and this being particularly an issue when the trade route value through a system grows, e.g. through colonial growth and/or new routes passing through.
b) there was an alert when a system has the risk of pirates appearing, as others have suggested (without having to go into the trade map mode)
Yes, I agree the sectors are far from ideal, and I believe the devs have acknowledged that fact, too; from what I understand, they changed their minds on exactly how the new system would work (and possibly ran out of time to polish the system they ended up settling on).
It took me a while to work out, but from what I can tell the sectors now cover systems two star lanes away from the first system colonised (with the core sector being systems up to two star lanes away from the home system). Once I realised that, I started to plan future expansion more carefully...
I would also like the ability to modify sectors, avoiding for example multiple single-sector planets (assuming the whole idea of sectors isn't going anywhere anytime soon). There are multiple ways the current system could be improved, and I doubt any of them would please everyone, but we could, without necessarily going back to the previous system, have:
- a game rule which restricts sector's to one, two or three star lanes from the sector capital (with the empire capital being the core sector capital, and possibly having a +1 to that cap)
- (rare/late-game) technology(/ies) which allow for larger sector limits;
- a buff to one of the traditions or - better yet - one of the otherwise underwhelming Ascension Perks achieving the same thing
A system tied to governor level would probably need to also incorporate some flexibility (for the situations where the governor dies and you suddenly have a series of fragmented sectors or something), but if it wasn't a hard cap and incorporated a degree of flexibility - in terms of sector capitals and the systems in a given sector - it could also be tied to other new systems, like crime. After all, wouldn't it be neat if the trade-off for having a system that's, say, five star lanes away from the sector capital, when your tech & governor level mean it should be no more than three, was that system would have 200% more crime, reflecting the weakened authority of your governor in that system? Wouldn't it be better still if the UI could clearly show you that?
Overall, I quite like many of the new features, but am disappointed in the lack of polish to a number of others - don't even get me started on the ways I think the galactic market interface could be improved!
