I'm beginning my own edit with a careful look at planet specs. To gain a better understanding of the default settings, I took the spreadsheet I've been using to work up my new planet specs and made a similar one for the default Gold planets. As you can see, the total production and per-colonist production varies wildly. A couple planets stand out, and a few others are decent, but most are essentially worthless.
I want players to have reason to colonize most of the planet types, rather than only two or three of them. For example, one planet will have the best production value per colonist, while another will have the best total production value. One will have the fastest citadel construction, while another will support the most fighters and shields.
Standard PlanetsMy question for everyone is, what should the ranges be? For example, it adds no value for one planet to support twice as many shields, if nobody ever maxes out the shields on the other types. Similiarly, I'm thinking it's not much of an advantage for class O planets to support 100,000 colonists, because (in turn-limited games, at least) that population level is probably never approached.
Then again, I could be wrong. What do you think? How many colonists do you usually keep on your PT/SDT planets? What about fighters and shields? Have you ever approached the ore limit of a class H?