I found a handful of minor grammatical errors (or not, maybe, depending on personal views about commas). There were also some areas where the thought structure got a bit clunky but the gist of what you were saying never got lost.



I imagine, however, that you didn't post this here for grading so I'll stop nit picking.



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Your outlining of the problems is hard to argue with. I don't think the general forum population (by definition the people here are more engaged fans) is going to deny the premise.



I think your solutions are interesting. I like the idea of "advanced" tile blockers allowing your planets to "grow" over time. My first thought was to imagine them not as "really thick forest" but perhaps a major undertaking like creating more usable land by raising oceans using materials from off world. Or perhaps modifying your empire's now vast experience in space to better utilize underwater terrain for production and habitation. I've always thought the "Mountain" and "Volcano" tile blockers being the same as "Kelp" was a bit odd. It seems to me removing a volcano would be...difficult.



I'm not sure making all planets size 25 to go along with this is quite as good an idea. I think at this point you're running head long into another, seemingly unrelated issue. (Spoiler: I don't think they're unrelated)



Issue 1: Essentially all the stuff you talk about. Your empire grows and the micro either becomes overwhelming or you pass it off to "sub-optimal" (we're being polite) AI. In addition the fact that the AI is "sub-optimal" hampers AI empires a great deal vs. a player.



Issue 2: Planets and systems in Stellaris are all the same. Obviously that's an exaggeration but when you boil things down it's not that far off. As has been said in more detail by others here there are very few truly motivating things to capture. As it stands every planet is just another set of tiles with the same bonuses as the last ten you colonized. Every system (bar Sanctuary and it's tiny handful of friends) is just a collection of the same orbital resources. They're adding degraded, repairable mega-structures and that's step in the right direction but it is far from a fix for this issue.



I think your proposed all-25 planets solution (along with the tile blockers and the rest) is an interesting stab and Issue 1 that unintentionally feeds Issue 2 a bowl of Wheaties. At this point I'll rope in your proposed changes to sectors; I like most of it in theory. The idea that we send off a governor on a ship to expand the empire and we lack direct control from that point on is actually fairly interesting. It certainly is more akin to "reality." Again though, I think you're solving Issue 1 while either making Issue 2 worse or at the very least not making it any better.



I think there's a major crossroads involving Issue 1 and Issue 2. Taking your solutions essentially accepts Issue 2 as a reality of the game takes the game in a direction that brings things back to (as you say) a more CK or EU provincial system. Does that make the ideas bad? No; see CK or EU as evidence that those systems work. I do think that for Stellaris, a game about the final frontier and wonders of space, we should be trying to indirectly fix Issue 1 by fixing Issue 2.



I will say that attempting that seems like it might make the second part of Issue 1 (AI's inability to optimize) worse. As it stands they're trying to make the AI better at handling fairly generic situations: the same planets, with the same tile bonuses, over and over. Lowering the overall number of planets while increasing the number of unique and valuable systems would probably make the AI's job harder and I guess I don't really have an answer for that. I mean it solves the Sector AI issue by removing or drastically limiting the need for Sectors but the AI empires still have be...you know...AI.



TL;DR: I think you had good ideas to fix your listed problems. I just think those solutions might not be the right direction for the game given that other, indirectly related, issues exist. It is certainly possible, however, that some aspects of your ideas could be adapted or included while solving those other issues and my imagination just isn't seeing how.