in file improvmentdefs.xml  under ManufactureLife; change value

<EffectType>DurantiumCost</EffectType>
      <Target>
        <TargetType>Improvement</TargetType>
      </Target>
      <BonusType>OneTime</BonusType>
      <Value>10</Value>

Be sure to put the modded file correctly in your mod directory

There are numerous balance issues with synthetics, and IMO, they need a solid nerf. I'd start with the innate pop cap, as 100 is crazy high compared to what other civ types can achieve (~25 feels much more balanced). Now consider their "innate" bonuses: no traits need to be dedicated to farms, growth, or morale, so that is 6 extra bonus trait points allocated somewhere actually useful. Next, they have no need for farms, cities, or morale buildings, translating into more usable tiles per planet. There is no cost adjustment that will balance out these gains. That the Yor aren't bottoming out their rating on Content, Fertile, and Farmers traits seems kinda silly (or just disable these traits for synthetics, which I think is the better option). Similarly, Silicon-based shouldn't be able to lower the Fertile or Farmers traits, as those also equate to "bonus" traits for a custom civ.

Well I have 3 save game files of completed games against Gifted AI, games that lasted about 200 turns, on large maps, and there is not a single AI farm or city to be found on any planet in any of those games. Not a single one. Then there are the dozen or so other games I've played where not a single AI farm or city could be found. 

I bought Northgard a month after GC3 and have spent more time playing it than this game. Northgard is in beta and is far more polished, balanced, and accomplished than this. GC3 could be amazing if you would put your ego aside for one moment and listen to what people are saying. The AI won't grow it's population and that makes playing this game pointless, beyond about 30-40 hours or so. It's not the fact that this bug escaped your notice initially that frustrates me. I have experience in programming, I made mistakes too, everyone does. What frustrates me is your sheer arrogance. You must earn arrogance with talent and competency. Right now you have a broken game on your hands. It doesn't work and your incompetence is showing. You have no right to be arrogant at all when a tiny company like Shiro games can make a better product on a far smaller budget. You need to adjust your attitude and fix your game. I know I'm not the only one who thinks this way. As it stands right now I doubt I will ever spend another penny on anything you've touched. I'm open to changing that position, though, if you just fix this one problem. 

 Sorry about not replying properly.  

I think software developers in general do a sloppy job of turning out a product.  It seems like more and more they are to busy just getting stuff out the door so it will start making money.  It's too easy to just "update" or "patch".  Before everything was downloadable over the internet products seemed to have quite a bit more polish, because you could not simply "patch" things over the internet.  Some might interject that things were a lot simpler back then.  Yes and no.  You would think experience over time would help developers to make an even more polished product.  But, the opposite seems to be true.  I think that Crusades should have been the first beta that was released.  GCIII didn't even start out close to were GCII left off.  That really disappointed me.  I feel like III should have been beyond were II left off.  Then the game should have got better from there.  What I mean here is all the features that were missing like espionage, ect.

That being said.  I have not posted a negative review.  I thoroughly loved II enough and had faith in Stardock enough that I figured they were going to work on it until it had all those features and more.  Now it does.  

Stardock has good product support.  This shows me that they do care and want a good product.  I think a lot of negativity was started in peoples minds with what GCIII lacked when it first came out and now some are still super critical.  

So here is something for everyone.

Anyone remember the very bugged version of Master of Orion 3?? The developer only did a few patches before giving up on the game. Game breaking bugs were left in it and so what could have been the best of that franchise was left to rot if not for the games community. There were two members of the community that patched the game as best they could to fix the worst bugs while the rest of the community modded the text files to make the game better than what the devs left. Be thankful for the support that you get from the GC3 devs. Yes there are issues. Yes the AI does not make enough food (my last game I only found 3 farms on a single planet). And yes, support will not last much longer. Maybe they can do some more cheap DLC to cover the cost of future bug/balance fixes...

Devs, if you want the community to fix balance issues (such as food) then you really should provide us with better tools to mod the game. Using Notepad++ to search and edit the xml is too much of a PITA. We need real tools to quickly and painlessly get the job done. If you have the tools release them. If they are part of the code game engine source then at least release the xml loading classes so we can build our own tools. There are A LOT of files to figure out and having the source code for loading the files would make new community tools that much easier. Even a dll with instructions on how to use it would be enough (I think). Right now there are not a lot of mods.

And last... my own gripes

1. Research, Culture, Free Trade Treaties don't work. Nothing in the UI and no changes to the colony or empire values. They are great for gaining credits and resources from the AI.

2. AI doesn't produce food, or not enough of it. This seems to be game dependent

3. Modding the xml is tedious and a real bear. It would have been nice to have some real tools or a list of values and what some of them do.

4. Galaxy generation will leave an empire with no habitable planets within a reasonable distance. I have had this happen several times, even when setting habitable planets to abundant.

Kudos to the new ground invasion though, much better than GC2 but still not on par with MoO3 (which I still prefer for ground and space battles).

They do work, but they only affect the civ that receives the treaty.

That mod didn't work last I tried it. Also, the treaties are supposed to be both ways.

@Franky999 What I am after is a program that already has all the base information so I don't have to type everything out or copy/paste what I need. I can write a program to do this but it is very tedious and I would rather have the source code from whatever tools are used by the GC3 devs to load/save the information so all I would have to do then is build the GUI in VC++ or QT. Having a ready made modding tool for GC3  would make modding the game and fan balancing much much easier.

Odd, maybe there was a conflict. I don't think any of the other mods changed the treaty file at all.

I have mixed feeling about this. You shouldn't take Steam forum seriously for one. Place is like a pile of toxic wasteland. I'm sure you have your reason why you going to abandon GC3 and start a new one. There is so much updates, fixes, improvements you could make before it hit it's limit, to the point that starting over and reconstruct the entire thing is better than sticking with the old one.

GC3 has big race customization is yes, i would say it is the main factor why i like GC3 more than Stellaris or ES2, but aside from that, there isn't anything else. Comparing this to Stellaris or ES2, both of those providing more variety of options for player to play with than GC3, even most players not going to touch or understand it, players some what like the feeling of "open-end options". You can tinker with an individual pop in both Stellaris, and ES2 but GC3 doesn't has that. There is political power, and representative in those but not in GC3. When talking about this kind of stuff, it feel like those games offering more than GC3. Look at Minecraft, how many percentage of people actually build a mega structures that the game proudly advertise and promote? Not that many but it is great to use it for advertising, and leverage players decision because you "could" make this if you want. Even you don't, it easily to use those screenshot of mega structures and boast about it to other people. GC3 has so little things you can tinkering with aside from race creation menu.

GC3 also goes through many changes, to the point it made certain group of people uncomfortable with it. The changes between vanilla, and Crusade is just way to massive for those people. Those are the people that mostly leave negative review from what i seen.

You do have a plan to start anew, that is good to hear. You'll get to develop your own vision fully this times since you'll be the designer in it. Brad, i like your work in GC2. I am waiting to see more of those.

Go here and DL this file. AI builds cities, farms and advanced farms fairly early (by turn 125). I've tested it on all of the larger maps.

If you want pop growth and a lot more, check our Franky999's excellent mod here.

As far as your Netflix-watching family, I think I saw a mod somewhere that makes them go away. 

The point of the math is for the devs to do it well, so the 90% doesn't have to do it. Why? Because whatever one comes up with in their spreadsheet is <5% better than what they would have done intuitively anyways. The devs doing the math levels the playing field between min-maxers and the normal players.

But the devs are entirely oblivious of this point for all I can tell and the reality is, that the best research planet is now one with tons of cities instead of tons of research improvements, which would be the intuitive choice for a reasearch focused planet.

But whatever.

What I write here will be heared just as much as the long demanded button for turning off auto-upgrading for all planets at once. This whole discussion is moot, because Froggy is gonna do whatever he pleases. Everyone should just cut there losses. Who doesn't mind shouldn't think too hard about it and enjoy it and who does should just leave this ship. Froggy is not gonna change his mind.

GC3 was fun for 400 or so hours and worth the bugs I threw so far. It is just sad to see it is not gonna improve from this point on.

I have thrown my '2 cents' in about this issue before.

Tie population to production buildings **, this is key! - problem solved.

Remove special resource requirements from city buildings,

Balance pass, make sure AI is building correct buildings.

**Each factory, Research, Wealth building has a population requirement (WorkerCap)

Colony Capital has a WorkerCap that matches its PopulationCap

Add up the WorkerCap per colony,

if WorkerCap > PopulationCap then calculate based on PopulationCap

if PopulationCap > WorkerCap then calculate based on WorkerCap

Building factories etc still yields the % bonuses they provide, but to get the best out of them you need population to drive them

Building just cities will result in a lot of unemployed people, which should effect moral.

link to spreadsheet.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1RwsAteC8CX-HRIoyAbx2T4TvhrELJqQ7

As far as I understood what was written Frogboy only wants to stop development of the base game, but not of Crusade. I hope I didn't misunderstand though ...