This is a long post, but I felt it was required to really explain my idea properly and the basis for my solutions. I'd like to know what you guys think and how you would improve it at all.

[The Problem]

The game more relies on the initial land grab than on the strategies used in conjunction with the varied and interesting abilities of the different races to achieve victory. Why have all these interesting abilities and attributes if in the end, all that really matters is how quickly you colonize and how many planets you have? It doesn't matter how good you are at research, construction, trade, politics, or military. If you only have 2 or 3 planets and your opponent has 6 right off the bat then you're not going to stand a chance. This introduces a rigged game from the start based on chance and luck.

Instead of just finances to afford the star ships and buy them outright at the start, there needs to be other obstacles to expansion. The obstacles are there but are very easy to bypass due to several factors. You can reach the goal (a winning advantage such as most colonies) without having to deal with the obstacles. The amount of colonies is ideally balanced at the start, just one. It is the ease and speed at which imbalance can be reached in the game that is the problem. I can tell what kind of game I'm in for within the first 10 or so turns of the game. This takes out the mystery and strategy and puts you into trench warfare mode right away, especially if you sent your ships to sectors that ended up having no habitable planets. If you were the lucky one, then you can expect an easy game.

The problem I see is that the goal is reached too soon without much effort or time involved. We seize the land quickly, do not have to worry about planetary invasion for a long time, and then sit back and build our new territory without having to worry about upkeep, order, or invasion.

[The Factors]

1. Too much starting money eliminating the reason for each race having their unique approach. This reduces the strategy.

2. Deficits are easy to come out of.

3. Planets are too easy to reach at the very start of the game. Can't reach a planet? No problem, just build a starbase or some cheap life support.

4. Lack of effect for having certain traits and abilities. It seems that number of colonies will determine the outcome more than intelligent play and strategy based on your abilities and available resources.

5. Planets are too easy to maintain and keep order.

6. No need to worry about Invasion for a long time after your colonies are established. If a civilization can build colony ships then they can build troop ships. These should go hand in hand. A colony and troop module should be one in the same practically.

7. No need to worry about aerial bombardment for a long time.

8. No noticeable effect on the home planet these colony ships are coming from. Production, morale, and taxes stay pretty much the same.

9. No noticeable morale effect when your population has an enemy fleet overhead or is invaded on the ground.

10. Fast population growth is achieved too quickly without the necessary techs or improvements. This eliminates the benefits of a fast reproductive race, further reducing strategy.

All these factors favour the initial Colony Ship search and expand mode.


[Ways to resolve the factors]

You should need to research, build, trade, use military force, influence and your political savvy, in order to reach these goals. That is the idea of the game but it is being implemented in an imbalanced way. The framework is there, and the game has some great ideas that make it fun. It just needs some thought and adjustment to balance it. This will bring strategy based on your civilizations government, attributes, and philosophy, to the forefront rather than as a bonus factor. Right now it's overshadowed by the ease of colony expansion and the consequent lack of usefulness of your abilities.

Everyone should be equal at the start like in a chess game. Each move you and your opponent make determines what kind of situation you will find yourself in. The game should be more about you and your opponents creating your situations based on your different strategies and focuses rather than working with a starting situation you have little control over and that negates the reason for having certain abilities.

The current setup is like finding yourself in a game where the pieces are set up randomly. You have more or less pieces than your opponent that had little to do with strategy. The one with the most pieces now has the ability to make his pieces stronger in less time than you no matter what strengths your empire might have inherently and the strategy you are using. Therefore each game is not starting even though it appears that it does; and each game is not so much affected by race attributes and governments though it appears that they are.

1. Limit the starting money or make colony ships more expensive.

2. Make deficits hard to come out of.

3. Limit the starting range of ships and make range extension more difficult to achieve. Perhaps you meet, trade, ally, and war, with a few nearby civs long before you meet the rest. As it is I meet everyone very quickly.

4. Make production and expansion more reliant on how well you take advantage of your particular race strengths, and minimize the weaknesses.

5. Make order harder to maintain and more penalties or events for ignoring morale. For example, a planet might revolt and become independent if you ignore it at low levels of morale for too long. It will then start to amass an army to defend itself and take things into its own hands. Perhaps it could start colonizing as well. That would be kind of interesting. You will then have to win it back somehow before someone else comes and takes it.

6. Invasion should be part of the equation from the start. Sure you can colonize as many planets as you are able and can afford to, but can you hold on to them? Right now it's not something that enters the picture. The aggressive expansionist approach wins out. No matter how good your race is in something the one with the larger territory can match or exceed your efforts since they have more to draw from.

7. Ships should be able to destroy industry and population right away. The larger your fleet the more damage they can do per turn.

8. The current scheme is alright it's just that population grows so quickly without the necessary techs that sending off huge colony ships loaded with colonists doesn't affect you. This amount is enough to get your new colony up and running quickly because of the high growth rate.

9. Bombardments should affect morale more severely as should invasions. Perhaps instead of sending in a massive army all at once you instead pick away at them to lower their morale and then come in with a smaller army later. Or, if you invaded them earlier, their morale should drop and influence the result of the second invasion. This would introduce more strategy. An orbiting enemy ship or fleet should automatically blockade the enemy planet. This would affect morale and trade. Knowing that an enemy ship hovers over you constantly would certainly damage morale to a great extent.

10. Make fast population growth only possible with the right tech, structures, morale, finances, and investment choices.



[What problems should be associated with Colonization?]

To answer that we need to look at what the individual colonist needs first to determine why we have upkeep costs in the first place:

1. Food

2. Shelter

3. Protection

4. Happiness

So now we know that these are the requirements and upkeep goes towards maintaining these requirements in better, more efficient ways.


[What determines upkeep costs?]

Formulas are fine for certain things, but let's try and figure out what creates the upkeep in the first place.


1. Food:

This is not part of the game, but I'll explain how the present farm structures could be enhanced to make it part of the game. In turn it will help alleviate this problem of unhindered early over-expansion. Presently, farming only serves to increase the population cap and does not affect the maintenance of keeping your population alive. So you can have a colony with 10 billion people and not have a single food producing structure. It would have been a better way to keep population growth and expansion in check. To make your population grow you need to be able to sustain them and this is where upkeep comes into play. I think this is the root of the problem and fixing this would help to make expansion more realistic. Farms are already in the game so it's just a matter of expanding their purpose and capabilities.

Let's say that each .1 Billion (100 Million colonists) require .1 Billion food units per turn. A number will indicate how much food you are making each turn on this planet. Perhaps the more you invest in social work the more food that is created based on the number of farms on the planet. A green number with a + next to this could represent the amount of surplus you are making. A red number with a - would indicate the deficit on the planet.

A new colony without the food structure should automatically start in the negative and require external support till it is established. A well maintained and established colony would most likely be in the positive. If your colony is in the negative then it will require external support in order to maintain. If you ignore your population at .1 for too long we'll assume they starve or scatter dissolving your colony. Your colony will then disappear from the map.


The food will need to come from within or from outside the colony. The logical way to go about it would be to have to build farms which would require investment and time to put in place as they do now. Farms are already in the game, so why not just make them dual purpose or expand their purposes? Until enough farms, and enough labor to run the farms are in place, you will have to receive support from your other colonies by way of transports delivering supplies. This would make a viable strategy for your opponents to thwart your efforts to bite off more than you can chew. In order to keep your quickly acquired colonies you will need a large fleet to support the transports in route. At the beginning of the game you don't have the means to research, create fleets, and construct structures, all at the same time. This will be an automatic limiting mechanism. What better way to limit things than by having the enemy AI's thwart your efforts of holding onto scattered and fledgling colonies? Eventually, with the right technology, you won't need farms for food and will get much more efficient at creating energy.


2. Shelter:

This is also not part of the game and is assumed to be automatic. Shelter requires social work. Something similar with shelter can be done as I mentioned for food. I think the food requirement is enough to keep things interesting and in balance. You can also throw them into the same basket and call it supplies. Either that or involve factories. The more factories you have the faster you can build housing to house your populace. The race growth factor would still influence your max growth and the amount of social work being done would influence if you could grow at your max or something below your max growth rate. It would be very similar to how food would be done in my suggestion.

3. Protection:

Maintaining a garrison to ward off attacks on land and in space. Researching and building structures to make this more efficient and powerful and to provide more troops. I think troops should have been done similar to ships. Since they are in solely as a numeric value of the population during invasions there is not much we can do about this unless more was added to the game. Ideally troops should be separate from population. The number of troops tied in to social work, population, and military production in a similar way to shelter and food. The quality of the troops would still be dependent on your race stats, technology level, and morale.

4. Happiness: Building a garrison or researching and building structures to improve it. As is done now with structures, taxes, influence. There should be the garrison option for Military Empires. They should get a bonus for keeping happiness with garrisons.