Finding 50 minutes to write is not easy. A few thoughts I've been building over the past weeks, but haven't had the time to assemble.
1. A heavily defended homeworld is not intended to outcompete a 20x planet used purely for production. If they did that would result in a meta strategy where there are no or minimal production planets, which are relatively soft targets. The goal is that any vet can choose increased safety or increased production - not both. If your goal is to completely maximize production, yes, homeworlds are thereby penalized relative to pure production everywhere. We will use means other than production to encourage homeworlds which do not eliminate strategic gameplay choices like production bonuses would.
2. You present a valid and interesting approach, to ignore all production except for T. Longer-term I want other resources to have a better balance to the point where producing them can be a strategic choice. This is not the update to fix that balance. However, flooding less of what people don't want anyway might help a tiny amount. That defensive resources are of higher value is one reason that the T and E buildings are a net negative on production points. In effect, we instead increased the value of the consumed resources to the fraction of the defensive resource they produce.
3. You present an interesting and valid analysis of farming nearbys. Nearby drops were introduced with no game design thought at all, and it is now clear they are a significant resource faucet which will need to be factored into future balance calculations. It is not my intent that a player should expect to spend hours clearing nearbys for resources, so while your analysis of production enabling time investment is valid, we will have to consider what level of daily time commitment we would like to expect of players. In a perfect world, strategy would win over both money and free time, while at the same time encouraging some level of engagement. Rewarding engagement while not overly benefiting time beyond some arbitrary "par" might be an impossible balance, however.
4. Overall your suggestion appears to enable a smaller resource outlay and reduced risk to achieve greater production than currently possible. I appreciate some elements, such as mandating production planets as lower-value soft targets by limiting total buildings, but the income numbers provided run directly contrary to one of the stated primary goals of reducing the income disparity between veteran players and new players. This is a relatively gentle change - no systems are being removed or items destroyed, so it is simple to return to former values. The code to launch this is currently running, save for the reduced interest and building production requirements, both of which are 3 total lines of code touched to enable. We might instead decide as a community that income disparity is a good thing, at which point we can change these values.
5. As noted above, concerns regarding income disparity are a major driver of this change. I would appreciate alternative solutions to address this same problem, or frame challenges to demonstrate why income disparity is beneficial to the game and will not drive away new players.
Okay, fine that was about 50 minutes of writing and weeks of pondering. Feel free to address any of the sub-points above individually instead of a longer writeup addressing all.
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SkyLords Head Programmer
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. He predicted our current meta before anybody else did publicly. Unfortunately, his concerns were correct and the game stagnated and lost active players. I think Cajin has successfully argued that most buildings are essentially worthless on homeworlds, and a suicide bomber wouldn't be needed for production planets, so I'll probably not look further into that idea at the present.