The problems come when you design your own race, the points buy system is clearly a sensible starting point, however, there are some that are massively under or over valued, the terraforming tech for starters, that is just an I win card; allows the colonising of any planet for 20 points and allows you to turn any planet into your home type, clearly that is way more powerful than the can colonise any world perk that is 60 points. I am not sure what to suggest apart from possibly just remove terraforming all together, or possibly implement some sort of tech tree and make it so that you cant get access to things as powerful as terraforming till very late in the game.
The max work force and don't need food perks are already very powerful as just that, neither of them also need immunity to pollution or anything else.
Some weapons are just strictly better in all ways than others, yet the techs cost the same, again a tech tree system would solve this sort of thing.
As has been mentioned in another post the government type does nothing at all.
Colonizing new planets as fast as possible seems to be a very powerful mechanic, as it is in most 4x games, and I like the reusable colony ships idea, however population growth is extremely slow, even if you have lots of things to speed it up and the actual population of a planet seems to have negligible effect on its performance.
My suggestion here is that a new colony should start with 500k instead of 50k * and that the construction, purchase, or refitting of a colony ship should draw that many colonists from the planet in question to prevent the spamming of new colonies by races with extremely low growth rates.
As to making facilities scale better with population (which will be more workable once population growth rates are more sensible) I would recommend setting a base value, say 5bill and that should give 100% efficiency, and simply scale it accordingly with the population, so if a planet has 10% (500mill) all the facilities would only work at 10% , and if it had 200% (10 bill) all the facilities would work at 200%, maybe with a minimum cap of 2% to prevent small colonies being unable to do anything.
These combined would prevent the tactic of ignoring food, never having a colony over 50k and not really caring about it since you can get more out of a planet by not having any food facilities and using the 2 spare slots to build better facilities for other things.
There are more but these are the biggest balance issues I can find.
if you actually fix all of these balance issues (not necessarily the way I suggested) then this will probably become one of my favourite games.
*population growth rates should also be on an exponential decay curve as a multiplier to the growth rate such that they grow faster at lower populations and slower when close to their limit, if you set it so the actual point that it decays to is a bit above the maximum population of the planet it will still reach maximum population, this may need playing around with a bit to achieve the desired effect eg. would mean you get 30% on a nearly empty planet, 25% when it is 1/4 full 15% when it is 1/2 full and only 5% when it is 3/4 full, or something like that, but since the % is of a larger number when the planet is fuller the actual growth rate should go up to start with then back down again sorry if this is not too clear, its complicated maths, but i hope you get the idea*
leafy
