Some ways of gaining additional influence:Should I then betray my ally in the Federation to gain their vassals for more influence?
I just realized I need to get the First Contact dlc alongside a few others now or after my current playthrough.There is also a tech from the first contact dlc, that grants +50 influence for insulting another empire (with a 2 year cooldown i believe)
The First Contact DLC is one of those mixed nuts sort of things. Some of them are good and some are bad. Overall I like it and make constant use of the Eager Explorer/Exploration Protocols civic.I just realized I need to get the First Contact dlc alongside a few others now or after my current playthrough.
It also completely changes the math on pre-FTLsThe First Contact DLC is one of those mixed nuts sort of things. Some of them are good and some are bad. Overall I like it and make constant use of the Eager Explorer/Exploration Protocols civic.
Actually if you use Eager Explorers (or their Gestalt variants) it gives nice bonuses and insight technologies, but yeah if you're not using them it's usually better to conquer the pre-FTL planetsIt also completely changes the math on pre-FTLs
Without it, there's no real reason not to conquer every pre-FTL you see because they're basically free pops and the benefit for not conquering them is just a handful of society research, while with it, there's basically no reason to conquer/infiltrate them, at least until you've rolled every insight tech or they're about to go FTL themselves
And related, the Shrouded Regions mod makes Eager Explorers much more powerful than vanilla since there's about a tenth of the galaxy that's off limits to everyone else for a large chunk of the game (no hyperlanes) and you can pre-explore it and do all the anomalies yourself.
Eager Explorers is also First Contact only, and without First Contact, there are no insight technologies.Actually if you use Eager Explorers (or their Gestalt variants) it gives nice bonuses and insight technologies, but yeah if you're not using them it's usually better to conquer the pre-FTL planets
Without First Contact, pre-FTLs don't really do anything except sit there waiting to be invaded, seduce your scientists and manifest asteroids.Eager Explorers is also First Contact only, and without First Contact, there are no insight technologies.