I think that ideology points are currently tied too much to one aspect of the game and that they incentivize that aspect of the game too much. I think they should depend less on how big an empire is or how fast it is expanding. Most points should come from moral choices based on domestic policies that do not depend on empire size or expansion. Ideology should be about choices and about narrative, not about expanding ones empire or mechanistically acquiring points.
Right now, ideology points are largely rewarded from colonizing planets. Almost every colonization seems to bring up a moral choice. That’s not necessarily a problem, except that this seems to form the majority of the opportunities to get ideology points. People are already going to colonize those planets – pretty much the point of the game is to expand your empire. But there needs to be more balance to how to accrue points.
I am going to guess that the goal of these points is to encourage a kind of role-playing in the minds of players. It encourages you to create a narrative of what your civilisation is actually like. Maybe you are cartoonishly evil in your own mind, or some sort of super-libertarian pacifist collective (or anything else). The game doesn’t give you much direct feedback on this, but I suspect a lot of us imagine it in our heads anyway. We imagine what it would be like to live in (or rule) a particular flavour of society. Based on his blog posts, I know Brad does. This is good and gives people an attachment to their empire.
But colonization/expansion (and foreign policy) is only one aspect of how a government or society works. You could argue that the US has an iffy track record (at best) in how it has acquired territory, yet most people would probably claim that it is mostly good. The character of a nation shows not just in how it expands but mostly by how it acts within itself and how it thinks about itself.
I think that the majority of ideology points should come from domestic events and not be tied to how large an empire is or how rapidly it’s expanding. Whether a society is good or evil (or pragmatic) doesn’t depend on how big it is. I think this would tend to balance smaller and larger empires (and maps) a bit better.
I also think that building “Temples of Good/Evil/Neutralness” to acquire points takes away from the roleplay aspect of the mechanic. It just seems like a way to optimize arbitrarily without presenting any moral choices or fleshing out ones galactic society. If we still wanted the economy to produce ideology points, perhaps projects could be a bit less generic and had a bit more story to them or added things to the game? For example, perhaps a good society could “uplift” a primitive species to the status of a minor race, adding them to the game after a lot of effort. This could lead to some choices about how to treat these new neighbours and would change the landscape of the game more than just adding a building that pumps out points.