Hmmm, that's some good points.
Though, I will say, it at least does seem to create the perception of extreme grinding, which may be another issue on it's own.
The problem is that, as far as I know, once you're locked off of political actions, there simply are no real options for increasing influence other than tech gifting (which can only be done so many times, and isnt all that much), popping pirate bases (rare), and the one that strikes me as the problem, which is grinding the hell outta dispatch missions. And heck, even with political options open, most of those usually dont give hardly any influence as a rule.
It gives the perception of "Well, if I ever use such-and-such action, I'll have to spend 80 years just clicking dispatches over and over before I can do anything again", which seems to destroy any benefits/uses that the influence-lowering action may have. It just takes too long to undo it, and the act of undoing it doesnt seem to involve much strategy.
I think that, frankly, you underestimate the desire of some players for a long, drawn-out war of the universe on that scale. In AI War, for instance, you're specifically discouraged from trying to take all the planets. It makes it into a huge grind if you try to, and generally kills you. And yet some players put it all the way up to 100+ planets and spend over 200 realtime hours grinding it out to take every. last. planet. That sort of thing surprised me, too.
There are also the players who play on 10/10 difficulty on AI War, where I would think it would be an impossible grind if winnable at all. But they enjoy looking for small chinks in the armor, and then using those to get closer and closer to victory. There are surprisingly many of the players of that mindset with AI War, and I think the same is true here. But you have to have the seemingly-impossible circumstances first, and then that lets you really start looking for chinks. If it doesn't seem impossible to start with, there's no need to do that search.
I guess it depends on what your definition of "grind" is. Would it be a grind to me? God yes. There's a reason I don't try to play those ways in AI War, and why I wouldn't play on Nightmare strategic difficulty here. But it doesn't cost me anything to add those things for the people who do like it.
And all of this brings up the question of: Am I missing something here? Is there some mechanic/option that I'm not seeing? I cant imagine that the players wanting to play at higher difficulties would really actually enjoy it much if they too had to grind dispatches into oblivion every time they ask the Evucks/Acutians to do something, so surely there's something here I"m not seeing. As far as I can tell from what I've learned of the game so far, there are only two ways to give meaningful influence increases, which is to give a race spacefaring tech, or complete a quest, which arent in yet and are random anyway (though they'll sure help!). There's got to be something I've overlooked.
Probably, although I'm not sure what it is. People know things about AI War and TLF that I frankly don't. Past a certain level of play, they start going "I did A B and then C, and went around my elbow and then did X Y Z and I won super easily!" It's kind of always an arms race with people like that, and actually I find that really fun (and so, with the AI War folks, do they seem to). They find some obscure way to win at the "impossible" difficulty level, we then discuss a way to "fix the glitch" that made the game winnable, and then they go back to trying to find another chink. It kind of makes for an interactive AI for them, in the case of AI War. I'd expect a similar dynamic here, with a similar group of players.
Honestly I find Normal difficulty to be plenty hard for me -- not impossibly so, I tend to win, but it's hard enough to be entertaining while never frustrating. But I'm playing it more of a "vanilla way," without looking for chinks or sideways solutions beyond the normal amount of out of the box thinking the game requires to play at all. It's why I play on diff 7 on AI War, too. So in those circumstances, on both cases, I'm missing out on all sorts of advanced strategies that other people have developed. Are you missing something? Undoubtedly. So am I.
But in terms of the more average-to-above-average strategic player style of play, I don't think you are. If that makes sense.
