This doesn’t even just apply to precursor artifacts either, but even common anomalies like capsules can give the civilization a bit of a boost. In fact they're the same size or frequently smaller than their less habitable counterparts, and the game takes that into account.It may not be quickly apparent, but finding artifacts and anomalies can be extremely useful for any civilization. My fallacy had been to assume that high-quality planets-since they have more buildable land-were larger. What it really meant was over-population, because however much food they might have to spare, eighteen billion people just don't fit on a planet. Every planet had masses more food than it needed, and yet they all cited as the cause of their malaise simply the number of people. My dim red approval percentages offer only "-50% from population" as an explanation. But I'd still like to know why it happens. I'd never quite been able to work it out, these plummeting approval rates as my civilisation expands-perhaps because by the time it kicks in, I'm usually in a position to obliterate any colonies my wretched inhabitants might want to emigrate to. Instead, to vent my anger, I made a counter offer of their entire civilisation-their treasury, every planet they owned, their fleet, all of their technology-for 1bc. Nevertheless, I had to sit back and breathe deeply for a while before I could trust myself to touch the diplomatic relations window without demanding every penny in their coffers for the privilege of being incinerated by the glorious ionised fire of the majestic Spectres of Agony military (which I would be building any day now).
The Torians! The joke was on them, of course-my early-game economic balancing act involves making exactly no money for the first few years, and the only technology I had that anyone seemed to want was Universal Translators-the very devices both of us were using to negotiate in the first place. The Torians, my incompetent pacifist neighbours, were bullying me for pocket change. Before long even the normally upstanding Altarians were demanding tribute for my continued existence, and eventually the unthinkable happened. I was the defenceless fat kid being bullied for my lunch money. The trouble is, with no military-even with one of the highest populations in the quadrant-everyone fancies their chances. I knew our next meeting would be even less productive. I amended the terms of the deal to them giving me 4.5 trillion credits, their entire military fleet and their homeworld, in exchange for shutting the hell up. They opened negotiations and suggested I donate 132 billion credits and the Universal Translators technology in exchange for my 'continued existence'. What happened was that I crossed the void with a single defenceless mining ship that didn't have anything better to do, and wandered around their territory for a bit. And it wasn't like one of the warlike races-the huge Drengin empire, for example-was about to cross the void to conquer what must have been the two militarily weakest races in the galaxy, sitting on a cluster of superbly fertile planets. I hadn't bothered to build up a military, because I was neighbour only to an incompetent pacifist, an opponent so feeble he wasn't even worth the warmongering reputation crushing him would garner. Day 2: I did not have diplomatic relations with that species We were breeding like Spectres, definitely not space bunnies. This is the Super Breeder ability, and at our peak, two-billion Spectres of Agony were being born a week. This made my population growth very, very fast. Nicely settled in, I locked my war-chest, cut spending, and dropped all taxation to zero. I even stole one in the same system as his homeworld-only a class 6, but it's the malicious, gloating thought that counts. Conserving cash as much as possible, I put what little I could afford solely into grabbing the juiciest planets and asteroid fields, including an absolutely utopian class 18 right on my rival's doorstep.
I got off to what seemed like a good start. A few other islands like ours were dotted around, one as remote as us, but we were on the outskirts of an incomprehensibly vast nowhere. We were isolated by a vast stretch of void on all sides, large enough that our ship's range would barely cover it, and which divided us from a chain of central clusters where presumably most of the other races lived. My race-the suspiciously bunny-like Spectres of Agony-found itself in a cluster of around 20 solar systems which, upon further exploration, turned out to have only one other race in it. Gigantic appears to be somewhere close to the actual size of a galaxy.