Keeping along the lines of 'thought exercise', what if energy collectors only produced 100,000 energy per system, and economic command stations recieved a significant buff to energy production (roughly 50k,100k,150k)?
A). Military and Logistics command users would be seeing their energy production halved compared to current levels, and roughly a third below the proposed target. In theory military and logistics would compensate by increasing your firepower or at least the availability of your mobile forces, letting you get away with less.
B). Users of regular economic command stations would fall directly into the target energy profile, and wouldn't see any significant sacrifice from putting a few up on the front lines.
C). Users of mk2 eco commands would effectively have 300,000 free energy for spirecraft and/or golems.
D). Users of mk3 eco commands would effectively have 600,000+300,000 energy free for a botnet golem.
E). Low AIP Users of Warp Jammer Commands would quite possibly call for a bloody coup.
F). What kind of fortress energy costs would Cinth be comfortable with?
In the case of E) you might consider promoting Zenith Power Generators to objective level importance in terms of map placement, defensibility, etc - I'm not too familiar with low AIP games or 9/9.
If the starting level of power for a low AIP, high difficulty AI game needed tweaking, there are some available structures for it, some of which are constant (command stations) and some of which scale in number with difficulty (those human settlement-type things).
If you were spamming logistics commands:
At two planets grabbed, you'd have 150k/300k (target, current) less energy to work with before dipping into converters.
At five planets grabbed, a plausible 7/7 everything near your homeworld, you'd have 300k/600k energy less to work with.
At ten planets grabbed (currently less than attractive barring fallen spire, but more attractive if you factor in the K and AIP reduction, quite reasonable), you'd have 500k/1000K less energy to work with, but you'd also have less critical planets you could task to economic comands. This ten planets falls more inline with the wiki's suggestion for an opening start. On the other hand, if you took ten planets when you'd normally take six, then that 300k energy shortage would be reduced to only 100k energy shortage.
Rather than adapt to the existing rules of the game, I'm still heavily influence by my first impressions (and my co-op games) which were (excepting co-op) inspired by consulting the wiki for some idea of what my open game should look like. So far I've completed (and also abandoned) considerably more co-op games than SP, but I'm currently going through a batch of SP training sessions in order to provide some more current feedback, especially now that you're not competing with Dishonored and XCom and FTL, and before Age of Wonders 3 and a -lot- of kickstarter turn-based strategy games and Dragon Commander divert my gameplay hours temporarily. Generally speaking, I like your proposed suggestion Keith Lamonthe, and from the perspective of your average mediocre 7/7 greedy player I feel this can only be a good thing. That said, I've seen a bunch of interesting proposals that dealt with refleeting times (the whole AI is having a 'who is winning' meter, based on what you've done/lost lately that goes fully up and down being my favorite with the player just setting things up differently in the lobby being my second favorite).
http://www.arcengames.com/mediawiki/index.php?title=AI_War_-_Rate_Of_Expansionhttp://www.arcengames.com/mediawiki/index.php?title=AI_War_-_AI_Progress#When_To_WorryConsidering the proposed excise of crystal in favor of a new improved hacking mechanic, my mind kind of hurts on figuring out the balance of converters and all that. Because on top of that, if eco commands got the proposed power boost, then they'd basically be worth two converters or more per system, if a person was willing to give up the extra resources.
