ORIGINAL: Malevolence
who's to say I can't drop a mining station inside someone else's sphere if I want. if you're strong enough to remove it go ahead and try. the brinksmanship and escalation is missing given the rules and insistance on total war or total peace.
I strongly disagree. It's the "brinksmanship and escalation" (as you put it -- personally, I call it bulls***) that I can't stand.
I still have just vanilla DW, and whenever another race colonizes or builds a mine that's clearly in my sphere of influence more than their own (and/or is obviously closer to mine), it drives me up a wall. It feels very "gamey" to me, and detracts from what is otherwise a great sense of immersion.
Maybe the SOI introduced in Legends is also gamey in a different way. However, from what has been said about this feature so far, it "feels" right....or at the very least, more right than my neighbors being able to build a shed on my proverbial front lawn!