Notice: Balancing Update Scheduled for April 11, 2017

It's day ten in my test game. No player interaction. Lots of small ai's getting whacked quicker is the main difference so far. And your test period is about up.

You should test this for a month or two not 11 days. Maybe more.

Players should be required to declare if they are Warriors, Colonist or Economist. By day 5 with the default being warriors.

Seems rather simple that way.

The resource changes are having a disastrous effect throughout the game. Even a big colonial empire is reduced to poverty. Everything is slowed down because of lack of resources. The increased provinces being your starting provinces they don't affect a large empire much. Also, the reduced production from colonies makes building up your trade posts to level 3 almost prohibitive as the maintenance costs have not been reduced.

You should have muuuch more money than before, so you can buy missing resources on the market. Before the patch market prices where down to minimum because no one needed resources, now there is finally a need for it (which should also drive their prices up a bit).

Another smart thing to do would be to upgrade your own core provinces. Because of their increased production upgrading them makes even more sense than before the patch.
And of course also conquering some other big countries that also produce more now.

Building up your core provinces only works at the beginning. Once you get a big empire (and you need a very big one for victory) your core provinces are too few to help much. And you can't just core captured big countries because coring was made so expensive in a previous update. The market is now not only far too expensive but runs out of stuff so you can't buy it at any price.

This update is a disaster and clearly it was not tested properly if at all in the mid and end game.

And it was outrageous to apply it to ongoing games where people had already spend a great deal of time under rules that required a different strategy.

The update was announced 2 weeks before and everyone could test it on beta (if you don't have frontpioneer access you can ask a game operator to get it).

Of course current strategies need adjustment to work. You cannot expect to continue exactly like you played before without any difference.

Not only did the frontier games take most of the test period to start up, they only tested the first few days of the game. And the resulting complaints were ignored.

I don't mind changing strategy for a new game but the changes devastated positions that I had been building for a long time and can't just change. The changes should never have been applied to ongoing games!

Not that there appears to be strategy to succeed in the end game with the new rules except waiting for everyone else to drop out and declaring victory alone. You don't seem to realize what the reduced resources for colonies implies for meeting the victory point total.

I think there intent was to eliminate the possibility of survival as just colonies. The requirements to Core are still too high, but the real costs that are too high are city level costs especially in the 6-10 level you almost have to spend the capital to core these levels of captured city or the base costs will ruin you to maintain as a non-core.