[James Sterrett]

The argument in favor of diplomatic penalties for the destruction of planets is that it makes the player's decisions in the game more complex. Do you take the easy, fast route, vaporizing the population, but annoying all the other empires? Or do you put in the work to make a planetary assault, deal with the unhappy population, and keep your diplomatic standing intact?

I don't know the details of how the system works in SEIV. In MoOII, the system essentially assigned you a permanent penalty to diplomacy every time you did something naughty. A similar system would probably work well for SEIV. Given the number of planets, it might even work best if you could eventually work off an early penalty?

Such a system doesn't preclude players from simply blowing away all in their path - but they need to orient their empire design on warfare to survive the diplomatic fallout (or, I suppose, be very good at diplomacy in order to counter the fallout). Either way, the decision-making becomes richer.

The downside is that it means more programming for Malfador, especially regarding the enemy empire AI.