Hello,
I'm making this post because I have an issue with the mod balance that I would like to figure out.
Right now I'm using the mod with a lot of other mods, so those obviously affect the balance. In particular I am using the Terraforming and Station Construction mod - which obviously makes forming your own colonies easier (especially when I can get AI cores more easily eventually via my own production).
Yet in my current game, my issue is: the AI factions do not found new colonies nearly often enough.
I am 4-5 years into my game, and am the largest faction in the game, with a total size of about 100 in my colonies. All of which I founded on my own (about 16-20 colonies in total). Most of them run with an Alpha Core, and despite the Hegemony sending occasional AI inspections it is trivial to bribe them (or I could trivially defeat their forces, but that's a combat balance thing).
In that time, the AI have formed a grand total of around 6-8 new colonies, with only 3 of the factions bothering to do so. So every single AI faction "put together" founds about 1-2 colonies "per year," which is an enormous amount of time given how easily you can farm money with bounties or other things and form your own colonies.
Effectively: does anyone know how I could fix this, and what options I should tweak if so? I want the AI to actually expand their empires among the stars (I have a larger size for my galaxy as well), so they can provide a credible threat to me for longer rather than being trivialized the moment I am able to hold onto a handful of colonies.
I think there also needs to be some limitation on using Alpha Cores to run your empire far past the normal size limitations, or else the AI needs to actually be able to pose a credible threat to you if you start doing that, but that's another matter which would probably require other balancing fixes.
Right now the fact that the AI seems to barely found new colonies, and also barely seems to go after your colonies with any actually dangerous forces, seems to make the game trivial once you are able to actually build your own stuff. Seems to me that moving into the 4x aspect and forming your own colonies should expose you to much greater risks, but I'm not seeing them.