I love the changes to Anomalies, BUT: Anomalies need to respawn!

[Dr. B]

Here is perhaps an opportunity to make "tall" play less suboptimal?

Let science ships, after <researching required advanced tech/finishing suitable tradition/selecting sherlock holmes ascension path> roam around your territory, automatic, scanning for new interesting anomalies/projects/archaeology sites, with an empire timer on how many you can find in a given year.

So you can expand into a lot of territory, reaping the rewards of having lots of space or you can really comb a smaller area and using it to maximum efficiency.

 

[Me_]

The only purpose of adding repeatable anomalies would be to make it so that after some point not every anomaly ends up being terraforming candidate (the only repeatable anomaly right now; the pre-sapients aren't really repeatable, there is just handful of them, but once all show up its over).

I guess adding a small list of +science, +resource for each science and resource type anomalies would solve that, but beyond this, a better solution is just to have more of them. Just like having same portraits repeat in huge galaxy being solved by adding more portraits.

I would welcome another Distant Stars-type DLC adding anomalies, archeology sites, Leviathans, unique systems and such and maybe a mystery in the galactic core.

 

[InvisibleBison]

Here is perhaps an opportunity to make "tall" play less suboptimal?

Let science ships, after <researching required advanced tech/finishing suitable tradition/selecting sherlock holmes ascension path> roam around your territory, automatic, scanning for new interesting anomalies/projects/archaeology sites, with an empire timer on how many you can find in a given year.

So you can expand into a lot of territory, reaping the rewards of having lots of space or you can really comb a smaller area and using it to maximum efficiency.

How would that make tall play better? There's nothing stopping a wide empire from also sending science ships to do deep scans.

 

[Dr. B]

How would that make tall play better? There's nothing stopping a wide empire from also sending science ships to do deep scans.

Yeah, you'd need to have discovery be like +/- X discoveries per year, and not per ship. Otherwise it would just be better to be wide and have a lot of science ships.

 

[Archon87]

Archaeology sites and colony events are supposed to take the place of anomalies in the midgame. Colony events tend to be a bit more trouble than they're worth though* and because they always spawn super fast after popping the colony down they're functionally also an early game event type.

More colony events that only happen after the colony has reached a certain age threshold (and aren't all ways to just screw the colony over) and ones which happen on conquered and/or integrated colonies which have different options and outcomes for different government types would be good. And these don't need to be world changing events, they can have the kind of minor outcomes that a lot of weaker anomalies do as well as more permanent changes (modifiers, new features, etc.), just something to interact with as colonies grow and change.


* Let me take a moment to expound my hatred for the Abandoned Terraforming Equipment colony event. Of its four possible outcomes, one is always negative (Tomb World, colony dead), two are negative in 75% of cases (random planet type has 75% chance to be less habitable than it started, plus one may kill the colony with monsters if you didn't prebuild armies expecting them because the colony is new and weak), and only one is genuinely positive.

So your choices are to gamble on a one in three chance of a positive outcome (plus spend on armies, almost certainly in the early game still), or to accept a permanent -10% happiness malus to the planet which you can never remove, even if you do complete terraforming on it later. The event sucks, and it's almost guaranteed the first time you settle an off-perfect habitability planet. If that's a very early colony for you the setback of having it go dead or to 20% hab can be amazingly annoying. It's almost never worth taking the risk of actually doing the project.

It's not the only one, the Pheromones event chain has basically no chance of a good outcome and a bunch of costs and penalties along the way so the only sensible way of dealing with it is to shut it down at the first opportunity.

Well the devs did tweak that event so that upon choosing to dismantle the equipment, the malus is removed after the project is complete. Before, it was only removed if you continued the ancient terraforming. So if I don't feel like rolling roulette, I just dismantle, and get free terraforming tech on top of it.

I agree with the overall sentiment that archeology sites are largely supposed to be the "mid-game anomalies." Most of the time they take too long to resolve in the early game to be worth it, and only rarely give a reward that is worth that time investment in the early game. Science ships should be exploring as much and as fast as possible in the early game. Archeology can wait until there is much less exploration to do. The only time I bother with archeology in the early game is if I get the Baol or Zroni precursors, or one of the sites with a huge payoff at the end like the Grand Herald (which I haven't seen since shortly after Ancient Relics).

As for colony event chains, I'm a bit annoyed at how consistent some of them are. I almost always get the dimensional portal and the odd factory, for example. I enjoy the slightly rarer ones more, like the dancing plague or the migrating forests. I definitely feel like the game needs more of these colony events, especially ones that happen only after the colony is well established.

 

[Dr. B]

Well the devs did tweak that event so that upon choosing to dismantle the equipment, the malus is removed after the project is complete. Before, it was only removed if you continued the ancient terraforming. So if I don't feel like rolling roulette, I just dismantle, and get free terraforming tech on top of it.

I agree with the overall sentiment that archeology sites are largely supposed to be the "mid-game anomalies." Most of the time they take too long to resolve in the early game to be worth it, and only rarely give a reward that is worth that time investment in the early game. Science ships should be exploring as much and as fast as possible in the early game. Archeology can wait until there is much less exploration to do. The only time I bother with archeology in the early game is if I get the Baol or Zroni precursors, or one of the sites with a huge payoff at the end like the Grand Herald (which I haven't seen since shortly after Ancient Relics).

As for colony event chains, I'm a bit annoyed at how consistent some of them are. I almost always get the dimensional portal and the odd factory, for example. I enjoy the slightly rarer ones more, like the dancing plague or the migrating forests. I definitely feel like the game needs more of these colony events, especially ones that happen only after the colony is well established.

Yeah, the abandoned terraforming equipment event is awesome, just dismantle the equipment and you can have terraforming tech in like 2210.