.

On the planet screen click Details, then drill further to Governor, which will pop up a little window with two checkboxes.  You want to uncheck the top one, every time you colonise a planet and on all your existing colonies.

Auto upgrade sucks.

Unfortunately there are many reasons why you wouldn't want to upgrade to the next generation of planet improvements. For instance, when upgrading from a Manufacturing Center to an Industrial Sector, you get a gain of +2 industry +4 maintenance. The upgrade generation before that and many before that was +2 industry +1 maintenance, so Industrial Sectors are a relatively terrible deal.

Plus the construction costs for an Industrial Sector is 400 while a Manufacturing Center is 150, so the construction costs more than doubles. None of the previous generation manufacturing upgrades even double the construction costs over the previous. Plus a construction cost of 400 is a tough pill to swallow on a new world.

If it were possible, I would like to assign Manufacturing Centers as my top tier manufacturing planet improvement and have all Industrial Sectors "upgrade" to them. The only way I can see to avoid these bad deals is not to research the techs. Unfortunately these techs often have other benefits (the industrial sector tech has another mining module, morale techs give civ wide morale bonuses, etc) so there is the temptation to continue. Also sometimes your creativity bonuses will give you the next tech for free, so if you were aiming for Manufacturing Centers, you might Industrial Sectors for free.

GC2Types.xml is for the ship modules, not the planetary improvements.

It is also not necessary for him to do all the work himself. There are enough mods already, that address this issue. Take my own, for example. I changed the maintenance to remain the same at all times, and use a fixed increase for the buildcost. This means, that high-end improvements are not only much cheaper to build, but also much more efficient. The Industrial Sector, for example, only costs 95 to build and has a maintenance of 2bc in my mod.

I actually believe that this is very good design, made to prevent a too fast "proliferation" (donno if that's the right word for it^^) 

high or endtier structures should come with an increased cost (and other downsides) because if such technology incorporates only advantages multifold then these will multiply itself with each other and a way too strong bonus will acumulate from this.

for example, in vanilla engines became cheaper and cheaper the more you researched - thus, once a new engine tech was researched it was superior to all previous engines (which then could be discarded or completely ignored) always making the newest engine to a no-brainer.

Right now most stuff in TOTA comes with advantage/disadvantage thus you can judge individualy, it's a trade off - cost & effectivety vs its opposites.

So firsttiertechs should always be very cheap and also easy to maintain, because you're building them when your economy is not yet sustained, quite the opposite, the colonial rush drags most financially into the minus. And this is a critical phase you need to get those Colony ships out and fast (which goes well because they are cheap)

In contrast the endgame situation is you're planets are filled up and economy is running, starports are building expensive warships who also come at quite some cost or maintance - thus, here a player needs to carefully balance and adjust his gameplay.

As I was playing that game as Yor who have alot of 1 per planet buildings the point was just to get those big industrial factories on planets where they are really needed to have some kind of average military output at least, for example low PQ planets. On high PQ planets with lots of free tiles tier 3 facs did suffice as I didn't want to "overcap" a certain amount of mp/turn, which is basically the build cost of your most expensive warship (otherwise you pay for the overflowing mp) 

Increased buildcost of latergame structures is also logical because by that time your planets will have sustained a middle or high social production already thus rendering the time to overbuild everything with newer tech considerably down.

One example, currently I have one planet where a tier1 fac takes 1 week to build, a tier3 fac 5 weeks, and a tier4 fac 10 weeks. And it doesn't matter if I build the tier4 directly, or first a tier1 which then will be overbuild with 3, then 4. The game shows in both cases 10 weeks total.  

However if I go second route I'll have an increased SP after the first turn which could hasten the process up a bit. And subsequently, the tier3 facs as well. Now let's say I'm going to populate 10 tiles with facs, I'd have a single tier4 factory after that time via first method, or 10 tier1 factories via the second one - which will produce 300%-400% more SP as the alternative. Subsequently the facs 3 upgrade will be narrowed down the a single turn per structure, too, and once they are finished, the tier4 facs as well.

And this will finally result in having the tier4 buildings 2 times faster than buildings these right from scatch - and that's exactly why these endtier structures should have an exponential cost. Otherwise, building facs early would take longer as in endgame^^

Trading influence points is basically a no-no if you want to get some sort of challenge from the game.  I mean, they're worthless really, the issues voted on at the UP are random and usually harmless, so it doesn't matter which way the voting goes.

welll I wouldn't describe it as "punishing" cause you definitely gain an advantage, however at an increased cost. just see it like that researching the tech is only part of the cost. though you are right on the AI part, but that's more a problem with the AI's programming.

there are many many examples where a real person can actually utilize the game way better than the AI even to the point you can actually fool around with him, esp. when it comes to spacebattles etc the AI most of the time locks on to a target ignoring everything else to the sides. unguarded troop transports aiming towards unguarded planets where a fleet just waits for it to arrive etc 

I'm pretty confident this is not the case I've just finished a DL 1.53 game. The AI is generally uninterested in IP though you might get some bc, but no ships at all or the other stuff I mentioned. In TA, with a good diplomacy, you can get up to 1bc for 2 IP. You can't trade them in big deals as their value seems to decrease then, but going in pieces like 100 IP for 40bc or 300 IP for 120bc will work until the AI is at 0 bc and that's just broken IMO.  

Yes it's true, the progression from enhanced to superior collectives is a big step, and it's something you don't want to do always. It depends on a lot of factors, and this will also differ from game to game. For example if you are amidst a war and your MMR is kinda dropping then no, don't do it, production of ships is more important.

But let's say you've just conquered  someone, your planets population should regrow again, there's no wars going on or hostile empires nearby - then why produce military ships that cost alot of maint for no real purpose? Maybe producing constructors and filling up your space with starbases - but that will come to an end, too, esp. that SB become excessively expensive to built once you got around 20 or 30.

So just upgrading your coreworld to the next tier while the new planets desperately need the SP to fill their tiles. (although one could go all-lab and build everything with focus from research or buy all structures but that's a whole different story... in my games I just reach that point where my planets are in a complete different state of evolution and thus, I always enjoy having something in the queue)

Another thing is that you're comparing only the base output of these buildings.I think it's safe to assume the farer a game advances the more empire-wide bonuses you'll got on these through Crystals, Starbases, Techs, other buildings etc.    Sometimes base production will bring twice or trice the output - and you just pay half for that.

As well as in later stages of the game, where the economy is going good, I don't think that the maintance of planetary buildings is actually a big factor.

Then there are also bonus tiles, these are very suitable for highend buildings. Or maybe you got a few specialized planets with ManuCap or similar percentagebased production-enhancing buildings - most of them are also only viable on special planets, on most not.

Maybe a planet where a special event happened during colonization giving increased ships HP - further add the Orbital Command Center, and this is your planet where you're going to build extra-strong and longliving warships. You want to have as much as MP as you can on that planet, irrelevant of the costs.

To be honest, I think there should be even more traps esp. later in the game (although it would require that the AI is aware of them). Because most of the time, once you've conquered or anexed the first or maybe 2 empires, the game is usually won. The problem is that by that time, once you gained an edge over the others this edge will grow stronger and stronger, and that growth will be faster than that of your enemies.

Once you're having more production, and you're using that to gain even more production, if there is not some overlying mechanism involved which is stiffling that (like increased cost/maint) then the whole apparat would kinda explode once it is set in motion.

Although there actually is something governing over that, and that is the economy, you gotta pay your stuff. And the economy is actually something that will be very low in the first year, and probably even preventing you from keeping the slider at 100% all the time. But between y1-y2 usually, if the game is going well, you should have a steady and fair income and that's giving you even the option to buy some stuff every turn.

What does happen when this is not in place? I just could see that with stockmarkets in the DL game. I would colonize a planet with 1000 colonists, and immediately lease-buy a stockmarket on the longest-term lease. At that population that investment would already net more bcs per turn than I would have to pay (23bcs vs 19bcs if my memory is correct) and that would even increase each turn as the population is even growing stronger cause without economic problems you can lower taxes to gain 100% approval! I then lease-bought as much as stockmarkets as were affordable and after 5 turns could leasebuy a stock on all planets, and subsequently after 4-5 turns could leasebuy one hull on all planets additionally - the economy shooting from 15k/turn to over 100k/turn.

And this is bad design in my eyes, one should not be able to exponentially grow an advantage over the other, rinse and repeat, and game is won. Nobody can keep up with that. Once you've reached that threshold it's game over, and it's boring from that point on.

You can see it in the respective curves - these were exploding. Curves should rise linearily *at best* problably even less. So even that lesser strong empires should be able to keep up, this would in fact promote longer games. But the question in charge is - how would you do that?

Because, everything that you're usually doing is giving you an advantage and that'll invested each turn to gain even more advantage. Although advantage is probably an inappropriate term for that as it is relative to what the others are doing. However, you will gain a return for whta you're doing each turn, and if you're doing it right, that will become bigger and bigger and bigger, and the only thing that could cross that pattern is an enemy empire growing nearby.