I would much rather see an addition to the code to allow for more planet types, could do sooo much with a galaxies options if huge, dwarfs, ocean, toxic, and stuff were added. 

Personally, pacts are to much a pain in the ass to bother with. 

The enemy of my enemy is also MY ENEMY! 

KILL THEM ALL 

Uh, there are mods that have added new planet types in (Infinite Space, Celestial Bodies, Sins Plus), so I don't know what you're talking about there.

Really?

Terran, Desert, Volcanic, Ice, Uncolonizable are the only planet types allowed for researching.
If I want to add a specific upgrade or colonizable research, I cant. 

There's also Asteroid and a few other types.

Sparda is talking about the individual planets, which will share planet research types. Though honestly I find all those mods with say Gas Planet colonization techs to be annoying, so I like grouping them into as big of subgroups as I can. One research that only give a +15% bonus to a single planet is near useless IMO.

Gas giant only is pretty annoying (thankfully 7DS does more than just GG with that research :P), but that third category can be whatever you want to class it as.  Sins of a Galactic Empire made the extreme-value worlds like Ecumenopoli a Tier 6 or 7 unlock so a player can't just rush them and use their extreme income and logistic slot counts to achieve an unbeatable lead early on.

There is also the "Invalid" group, which surprisingly is a legitimate research class. There's Asteroid, Terran, Desert, Volcanic, Ice, Uncolonizable, and Invalid avaliable, plus the game allows for a single custom planet type.

Tier 4 (aka. 5 research stations) plus large militias, to be exact. Credit for that goes to NovaCameron; SoGE makes use of a slightly modified Novus Universum.

??

In Sins Plus, there was a GasGiant research type (forget the exactly what it was called), that worked. The dev exe did throw an error on start-up, but otherwise, it functioned as if it was already in the game itself.

Is it possible to make a single factions Culture only spread between owned planets?
If so how would it be done?

Technically, no. However, increasing neutralOrbitBodyCultureRepelRateMultiplier and enemyOrbitBodyCultureRepelRateMultiplier to high amounts might do the trick.

If you're talking about the gameplay.constants file, that would apply to all factions right?

Well, what I really want is for the majority of my factions to only spread culture within their owned planets, but for one faction to spread like normal, or close to it...

if I use the constants, could I then give that one faction a huge culture boost to override the constants file effects??

Yup.

Yes, though I suppose you could put an ability on all the other faction's culture centers to spawn small amounts of culture at all nearby planets....

Yeah, you might be able to rig something up with the culture research modifiers as well. So if it is possible Wintercross it is a very hacked solution that would not be easy to set up.

Sorry, I kinda miss represented what I was after;

I want One Faction to spread culture similar to vanilla sins, the others to only spread culture to owned planets.

Ah, I thought you wanted the opposite. You can totally prevent culture from spreading towards enemy planets like Lavo suggested, but that applies to all factions. However, you may be able to simulate the normal Sins culture via abilities like Seleuceia suggested. Or you maybe able to leave the default culture as it is but use abilities and research on all but that one faction that will prevent culture from spreading towards enemy planets. Either way, no one has probably tried that, but I think all the tools available to you have been mentioned.

ok, thanks for the info guys! i'll try messing around with it and see what i come up with.

I did something along the lines of what you're aiming for with the Borg.

I gave them massive culture resist, but very low culture push to equal it back out.  If you do it at 10-1 for instance, they can effectively be held off by a single culture station after filling an adjacent desert up.  They'd still be able to hold at 1/1 stations though.

BTW guy who had planned to rendezvous in game last week.  I lost the net for a week there.   Had a defective power adapter on my line amplifier to the cable.  The light was on but no one was home.  Just got my net back late Saturday.

...and I was almost completely through withdrawal.  Oh well, back to addiction.  :)

I noticed a crash when testing a weapons platform (stationary defence like gauss turret) it seems they cannot have more than two weapons, is that a hard code limit or did I somehow totally need up the entity?

My stations (replacing gauss and hangar defense) both have two weapons. However, I also removed all research-related stuff for them. I'll test more than two at some point and see if it causes problems.

I have two hangar defense entities, both with the hangar defense and weapon defense roletypes, respectfully, with three weapons, fighter squadrons, and research to unlock them, without issue. As for the weapon defense entity itself, it could be a hard code limit, however you could bypass it by making weapons as passive abilities.

Unrelated, but does increasing or decreasing the value of aiRetreatThreshold make the AI less likely to retreat?

Yes, aiRetreatThreshold is related to how the AI calculates threats in the gravity well. Make note that the AI doesn't account for modules in its threat calcs (which is bad for my guys because my stations do 100k DPS and they often jump into a system that has no ships in and thus must be "undefended"). This threshold is unrelated to attack threat calculations, and I don't know exactly it calculates threats (possibly dps totals or something).

With the default threshold the AI retreats far too much for my liking. I reduced this down to 0.1 or something and they retreat much less often.

Ah, so decreasing the value makes the AI less likely to retreat. Thanks!

Also I believe it calculates threats based on ship stacks/pure numbers (see the little bars on the side of a planet's icon when zoomed out). As there have been times where I'm against an AI, it has a better fleet, but it has less units total, and it retreated.