A suggestion for a game option

Interesting idea. Sort of like how the minor races are in the beginning of the game? They all start out with a 15PQ homeworld, which makes sense cause theyre not allowed to expand(except for starbases of course). So theyre forced to focus everything into one super world. And also why theyre such a target throughout the game, you grab one of those and youve gained a planet that has as much influence as your home planet if not more.
There is of course a way to set this up in the intial game settings, just max out your race's planetary bonus ability. Im not quite sure if ive ever tried that(focussed all my ability points just on that) but i can imagine that youd start ouf with atleast a 15 PQ base home planet. Add in the line of planetary improvements and youll no doubt be approaching a 50 PQ planet(though more like 20-30). And then if you set the rest of the game to a galaxy with rare habitable planets then youve already got a lead on the other civs with youre one super world.

Thats rather easily done. Ive myself coded a random map generator utility that creates random maps but with the option of setting quality, location and etc of homeworlds.

Ive made mainly for when I play the Star Trek mod so the the Feds wont start right next to the Borg but if there is demand I guess I can polish and make it available.

other than a few things, its a great game.

a few things i would like to see is in the build ship screen, on the top where it says 'all' 'core' and 'user' is a 'class' tab also. when i start getting a lot of tech, i would like to have something that i can name like, 'battleships' or 'beam/missile/mass defence/offence' that i can open. maybe look like explorer or something. something that i can organize my ships better.

maybe pilots. if your fleet gets destroyed, you have a % of having one or all of your ships use their evac pods. these can hang around for a set amount of turns, maybe, not have them able to be attacked or something. and the fleet that picks it up get a bonus from the pilots experience.

the ground attack graphics. come on.

sub missions. have a pop up tell you that you either need to, or gives you so much of something if you take over 'X'. maybe a planet or resource or anomoly. something that will make me do something else, or make me have to get a certain thing beore they do.

have the starbase, i around a star, be able to rotate around that star to protect the planets. make it slow at first then research speed.

I like your random sub-missions idea, it would make the game more interesting. The arrival of the Dread Lords is kinda like that, right? Except you could have missions like: 'colonize this world, it has precursor stuff', 'take this world because it has an experimental whatsit', that would definitely be cool.

One problem I have always had with 4x games is that size matters too much. Production, research and pretty much everything is proportional to the number of cities/planets you have. Historically, this was seldom true with small, clever nations like Greece, England and Japan being vastly more powerful than poorly managed larger ones. I think this would be easy to simulate by simply allowing the home planet to have a greatly increased PQ. Right now it is always a PQ 10 if I'm not mistaken. If the home planet could be a PQ 50 or more, then having a small but immensely powerful empire would be much more viable. Map position would mean far less and the early colonization rush would be less critical. It might make invading it very tough, but it should be very important and very tough to take.

I don't see how that would make a difference. The large empire will have the PQ50 homeworld, too. All you achieve by this is making non-homeworlds worth less. But the larger empire still has an edge over the smaller one (not to mention that the game would be really boring because there would be no point in expanding). And if you only give it to some, what makes those select few not take the big bonus they get and use it to get even more planets than they could otherwise?

Your comparison to history is invalid as well. Yes, historically small nations sometimes fared better than large ones. But there was a reason for that, like better tech, resources, administration, you-name-it. Since this is a game, everyone has access to the same techs, policies etc, so there is no way to do this (apart from explicitly giving smaller empires some huge bonus, but that would be bad for the game since then no one has reason to grow and be ambitious anymore).

The only thing that you can do is give them a small bonus or punish bigger empires to some extent, but not so much that it is pointless to get big. And that's what is already done.
Alternatively you could custom-build a race that gets big bonuses to everything but gets heavily penalized for aquiring too many planets. But that would be very artificial, plus you'd need a completely new AI for it (and for competing against it).

As long as you are not playing Metaverse, it is very simple to edit the CustomPlanets.xml to give you (and any other race) higher PQ planets.

As long as you are not playing Metaverse, it is very simple to edit the CustomPlanets.xml to give you (and any other race) higher PQ planets.

Thanks for the suggestion, I was hoping there was something like that. I'll try it and see how it goes.

Sort of like how the minor races are in the beginning of the game? They all start out with a 15PQ homeworld, which makes sense cause theyre not allowed to expand(except for starbases of course).

if you give the minor races colony ships they will use them if there are any planets left

I have had a few recent 1.4X games where the Jessuins got extremely powerful early in the game, declared war on the Yor and captured half a dozen planets.

It was a nice thing to see.