It's not really removing any strategy here. We've had to apply various strategies to stay alive as long as we have. It's also not been indiscriminate. We've specifically targeted key locations to reduce the entry-points into our systems. We're also experimenting with how the AI will react to being completely cut off and surrounded on both fronts.
Fair enough. I'd say that is just pushing the strategy envelope to its extreme, then, which is actually really cool. And I think that Haag and eRa have also been pushing the envelope in the other direction, of staying small, only that was a little bit too effective for Haag in particular.
Of course, after loading our 14B game in 14U, the changes (lack of power, steadily declining resources, and the recent AI tactical enhancements) have led to the not entirely unseen destruction of our frontline planets. D'oh!
Yeah, figures... Hopefully with V that will largely be resolved, though things might be a bit more dicey for a while.
Had we not already put so much time into this game, we'd probably be more open to starting a new one. I'm sure you can appreciate why we want to finish this game, one way or the other. Besides, it's provided us with a wealth of corner cases for debugging. 
Oh yeah, I completely understand. And yeah, the corner cases have definitely been great for debugging.
I'd suggest 60 or 80 planets for your next game, though, just to keep the unit counts a bit lower and thus your game moving at a better speed if you are going for that level of completionism.
Except when it messes with the balance of the core game, which binds all of these offshoots together.
In practice, this is the difficulty. I don't believe our play style goes against the core values, it just challenges them in a different way. The game is about the war against AI, after all. We won't feel like we've succeeded in the war against the AI until every one of those little blighters is a pile of space debris. 
Well, that's fair enough. And I'm sure that this sort of mode actually does provide all sorts of other challenges that make it much harder than your typical difficulty 5 game. So that's cool and interesting in and of itself. I don't think you could use the same strategy on difficulty 7 (and my goal is that you not be able to), but as an easier-difficulty-providing-harder-play-options, this one is pretty darn cool. I don't object to people making the game harder on themselves, or doing whatever other odd strategies, I just object when one of those odd strategies lowers the difficulty of the AI in a way that is destructive to the feeling of balance in the game. Given the length of your game, I suppose I should have just assumed how hard it had been to balance all of that expansion you have been doing.
I think several balance issues are stemming from the fact that some things are scaling with advancement through the game and some aren't. People who rush the AI from the start are finding it too easy to do so, so you're increasing the strength of raids and cross-planet attacks (these scale, sometimes disastrously), and introducing more energy restrictions and economic changes (these don't).
Well, in V now these all do scale. I think it's a good point, though -- now everything scales. The increased strength of the raids is in response to the increased economic power of the players, moreso than anything else. The idea there is to basically provide a bit of a faster game, so that players don't have to wait on the production of stuff so much. Having that feeling of "this is slow as molasses" is what I am trying to solve there, moreso than any balance issue. Those changes
caused balance issues of their own, of course, which now I'm trying to bring back into line. I think V is getting pretty close, but I'll be interested in what everyone thinks.
Advancement alone increases the AI progress. In my opinion, AI progress should increase more rapidly for assaults on important planets and especially on those that are closer to the AI home planet(s). This may mitigate the need for some of the economic changes that have been made over the last series of pre-releases.
I don't think it would mitigate the need for the economic changes, and I think it might just have the side-effect of making players hop over certain AI planets even more than they do now. The best strategy is already to hop to the AI homes from a planet away, so I don't think more incentive for that is needed. But increasing the variability in AI Progress increases on planets is something I want to explore, for sure.
Personally, I thought the too-many-producer penalty made sense; however, if removing this helps balance the changes, I'm all for it. My only concern with the continual consumption of resources by the reactors is that they will always be at odds with expansion.
Well, those are at odds with expansion, you are quite correct, but the new non-diminishing harvesters supports it. So that way you should always be able to break even plus a little as you expand. And since those outer planets also provide cover to your inner planets, I think that makes for a net imperative to expand, which is the goal. As Haagenti demonstrated in 1.013 and prior, the most economic imperative was to stay small and raid, which was counter to what most people seem to
want to do, and which was exploitatively easy. So this is really mostly geared toward fixing some balance issues at the other end of the spectrum from where you've been playing. Hopefully it does not subsequently unbalance your end of things, as U obviously did.
Perhaps by having energy limited by resources, unit caps may no longer be necessary.
The unit caps are to keep players forced into building varied fleets and using their lower-level units. Another key innovation of this game that adds to the strategy (a number of reviewers have commented on this, actually). Originally there was no unit cap in the game at all, but my alpha testers just spammed their favorite unit and that was that. Or maybe a pair of units at best. And, like in other RTS games, everyone always just built the highest-mark they were able to, which also reduces strategy somewhat. So adding in those per-type-per-mark caps was one of the best things to come about during late alpha, actually, as it added so much strategy to the game.
I apologize for taking so long to post this. Solaryn and I were discussing this all for some time before finding 13 14 more posts we needed to factor in and respond to, following this line.
Yeah, no worries. I wasn't expecting anyone to rush to the keyboard and dash off a response.
Kal -- for your save, I see that your teammate (Solaryn) has a ridiculous number more reactors than he needs. As in, he had a net energy balance of 1.8 million even in the new higher-energy mode, I'm not kidding.
We were more interested in getting out of the negative energy balance than doing the math necessary to realize we were building too many. It just so happens that he didn't lose as many planets during the raids as I did.
Gotcha. Makes sense.
With your civ, I see you have a 100k balance of energy at the start in version V, and negative metal/crystal balances. I think that, in this particular game, that is mostly due to Solaryn taking way more than his fair share of the metal/crystal harvesters. He has an incredible amount of extra resources, whereas you have far too few. He has 76 each of metal and crystal harvesters, while you have just 55 and 53, respectively.
Actually, he did no such thing. I had slightly more than him until eight of my planets were swept away during our rush to build energy reactors. We didn't have a chance to trade any because we were still trying to dispatch all of the attacking ships.
Also makes good sense.
Oh, and I discovered that your metal manufactories were also still running, which is why your metal balance was negative.
Sure they weren't my crystal manufactories? I know I used those.
Sorry, I said the wrong word.
I meant crystal manufactories.
So, just looking at Kal's game alone, it's looking like V is very balanced. My own savegames were all balanced just fine in U or V, but I tend to play right in the "sweet spot" of where this is being balanced towards, anyway.
Thanks! We'll let you know how it turns out.
You bet! Thanks for the responses!
We're going to start out from the end of last week's save, though.
Makes sense to me.
As a suggestion to help alleviate some of eRe4s3r's concerns, perhaps it would be good to reduce energy usage when constructors are paused or not producing.
The only problem with having temporary energy reductions is that then if you re-enable them they can send things negative -- or the game has to prevent them from being disabled, either way. But, I suppose that does make sense as a quick way to restore a energy balance, so I'll add that to my list: paused ships to not cost energy. I think that may help, at least.
