What about basing Industry and Research (and Influence) meter increase rates on Infrastructure?
That's already the main purpose of Infrastructure (also soaking some damage), but it is limited to Planetary Defense and Shields:
- Shields: + {0.25, 1.0, 2.0, 3.5, 6.0} * Target.Construction per turn (modified by current values, but that is irrelevant for my point here).
- Defense net. regen. 2: + max(0.1*Target.MaxDefense, 0.25*Target.Construction)
Currently, PP&RP meter increase/decrease rate is +1/-1(*) per turn, until you get Energy Force Structures (EFS) and it becomes +3/-5 per turn.
(*) This +1/-1 is a source of micromanagement only minimally alleviated by the initial focus change penalty that only applies for the first turn after switch: when max industry is much greater than max research (or vice versa), you can wait to max out industry, then switch to research until it is maxed out (which happens sooner than reaching minimum industry), then max out industry again, and thus you keep on average a better combined RP/PP progression than sticking to any of the two foci.
It is further alleviated if the decrease rate is always bigger than the increase rate, as in +1/-2. Still not enough when one target meter is more than twice the other, but with current mechanics that situation becomes much less common. Coming back to Infrastructure...
Sources of Infrastructure (Construction):
- Base: 20
- Imperial Palace (capital only): +20
- Basic Shipyard: -10
- N-Dimensional Structures (NDS): +10
- Megalith (capital only): +30
- Philosopher special: -20
- Abandoned Colony special: +10
Ignoring the specials, this boils down to the following Infrastructure levels:
- Capital: 40, 50 with NDS, 80 with Megalith.
- Colonies: 20, 30 with NDS.
We could do:
- Equal 10 Infrastructure to +0.5/-1 meter change.
- Make EFS, NDS and Megalith give +20 Infrastructure each (so colonies have 20, 40, 60; capital 40, 60, 80, 100).
Thus we would get:
- Colonies' meter change rates:
- Base: +1/-2
- Plus EFS: +2/-4
- Plus NDS: +3/-6
- Capital's meter change rates:
- Base: +2/-4
- Plus EFS: +3/-4
- Plus NDS: +4/-8
- Plus Megalith: +5/-10
Abandoned Colony special would give +20 infrastructure (+1/-2 extra change rate). Also Abandoned Fortress.
Other unique buildings could give more local boosts to Infrastructure. Something like the Industrial Center that we already have, but also yet-to-come buildings related to multi-species empires, something that allows to have more planets with greater-than-average infrastructure at the expense of having a less powerful capital (distributed vs centralized strategy).
Every spamalot bulding (basic shipyard, orbital drydock, interstellar lighthouse, scanning facility) could give -10 infrastructure each, so that the four together makes a capital unable to increase its PP/RP until EFS is researched (and then only slowly), and colonies would need also NDS.
This approach discourages spamming buildings on populated planets because it slows down or even halt their meter increase. However it is not enough and might be seen as annoying since it would also encourage micromanagement, specially Scanning Facilities and Interstellar Lighthouses, also shipyard+drydocks.
Removing Infrastructure penalties from buildings and rely solely on Influence Upkeep to control their numbers (anti-spam) would work similarly (better probably), but would not remove the micromanagement issue.
In the end I think the best anti-spam/anti-micromanage measure for buildings such Interstellar Lighthouses and Scanning Facilities (which players want to have always where they are needed) should be through (Influence) policies that doesn't require the player to constantly scrap/rebuild as the borders of the empire evolves.
But meanwhile, we could try the -10 per building idea.
Problem (possible exploit) with all this suggestion that I hope someone can help me solve: a player could freeze a planet's PP/RP meters on a high value by building enough on it and not researching the construction techs. I can't see any situation in which this would be a helpful exploit instead of just a nuisance, yet this might need more analysis.