Zenox drew the short straw with colony suitability

[boolybooly]

I think the RND for Zenox worlds is broken.

The ice planets have lower base suitability than desert planets as Savannah quality range starts at 35-55 whereas Tundra starts at 30-60.

Zenox only get +25 on their best world type Ice Tundra when Teekan get +30 for theirs. This is a real penalty for Zenox, if you do the math, because it means their best quality Tundra colony only cancels out 5 less suitability boost but at the low end of the quality range they lose colonies which they cannot colonise equal to a sixth i.e. 16.7% of the world type because the minimum colony they can colonise is 35 and the world range is 30-60.

Whereas Teekan can colonise anything 30+ which means all their planets.

That is theory. In reality e.g. my current game with NORMAL colony prevalence, I surveyed over 50 systems to a range of over 100m and found a dozen ice worlds including 6 Tundra planets and only one of these had a suitability over 20. In a recent teekan game with RARE prevalence, they had four Teekan desert planet colonies at this stage due to an abundance of habitable desert planets with suitability over 20. So Zenox have in practice less than half of what Teekan get.

Out of the five unusable Tundra planets, two have quality 26% which should not even be possible, they are supposed to start at 30% which looks broken to me, how can they be less than the minimum quality range for the planet type?

I just feel like something is broken for ice worlds and the Zenox.

[Nightskies]

Most empires should be grabbing up independents before going for any but the most lucrative worlds. Even without independents, the Zenox more than make up for it with the best ships overall. This comes from very strong shields (Zenox racial shields AND their ships have the most defense slots across the board) and they have a very good racial weapon.

However, you are correct that they suffer from a relatively rough ability to colonize (for a primary race). They also suffer from poor population growth, but their tech and espionage bonus more than make up for that.

Nothing broken here.

[Jorgen_CAB]

Nothing broken here.

I would agree, you need to look at the species as a whole and not just one value.