Tall vs Wide

Well, I am not sure about Full TALL, I would expect you would need to mod the game a bit. 

But personally I like to limit the number of habitable worlds to reduce the tedium.

So instead of having 200 planets in a immense galaxy in endgame, I would have a few dozen.

That worked well for me in making the game faster, and incidentally more fun to play.

I think You will be able to set your galaxy parameters to make your game play more on the Tall side vs the Wide side.  But if you really want those "Single City planets" it should not be too hard to achieve with modding.

That PQ 4 world can, with a bit of luck, turn into a PQ 16 world after you're done with terraforming, so don't dismiss it outright.

Just conquer the planet, and then destroy the colony. It's much quicker than going for Terror Stars.

In general, I prefer going tall. In space 4X games, however, I always go wide. When the survival of your race is at stack, it just doesn't make any sense to me, to put all your eggs in one basket, so to speak. For example, in one of my last GalCiv 2 games, the Drath got wiped out when their last two planets revolted due to a random event (the Fundamentalists from what I remember). Well, it served them right (bloody bastards first made everybody else declare war on me, because I was Evil, and then turned Evil themselves), but it's just way too easy to get annihilated simply because of bad luck.

Stardock 4X *usually* don't support the 'Tall' strategy all that much. Legendary Heroes did to some extent with the expansion penalties.

 

 it just doesn't make any sense to me, to put all your eggs in one basket

True, but historically, overextension has led to issues of their own.

True, but that is preferable to extinction.

The problem is that it's hard to have a game that has both wide and tall empire building that doesn't fundamentally favor one or the other.

4X games are, as Sid says, filling buckets. And you fill those buckets faster by having more stuff. And you get more stuff by having more cities/planets/etc. Civ5 had the Culture mechanic that gave you massive penalties for more than a handful of cities. This meant the culture victory was only possibel by making tall empires, not wide ones. But good luck trying for a culture victory in MP. There's no way to protect yourself from the  Mongolian or Aztec hordes by throwing paintings at their armies.

Bascially you need a game mechanic that by design favors tall small civilizations. Which rules out military or tech victories.

Why not both?

All of my big-map civilizations are always somewhat largr, and very heavily developed. You shouldn't consider the two concepts of "Wide" and "Tall" as mutually-exclusive, but as two extremes on a scale. 

I think this should be implemented by a particular race. It would be nice to see a devourer race, one that where you can choose to settle a planet, or destroy it for goods to your other planets. Send a colony ship or send a devourer to eat the planet reducing the class by 1 every 10 turns, your chosen planet a large bonus to production during the process. This will allow for a tall vs. wide empire.

I really don't like the wide vs. tall dichotomy. In Civ it was introduced to temper the dominant strategy at the time, which was to get 5 or 6 cities as soon as possible. Then in Civ V I think they went way too far in making it difficult to play wide. In GalCiv I don't think an early colony rush is a problem, in fact I think it is a fun phase of the game, especially with the rarity and variability of habitable planets. I really hate in Civ how success in conquest cripples your economy unless you puppet everything. It sucks to be punished for doing well. I know that some kind of mechanic to make more cities less efficient is a staple of 4x games these days, but I really hope Stardock doesn't put it in. Let is play wide AND tall.

That being said, I would be all for certain races that play wide or tall, like one that can settle any planet, but never gets quality above 6, or one that gets one super planet and can't settle others (or basically just turns other planets into giant resource nodes feeding the core planet.) I think these would be fun and interesting variations on the core gameplay.

I don't see how this was a problem in Civ5. They got rid of Corruption, by far the largest 'rubber banding' mechanism in Civ4 to penalize wide empires. The only tihng they ddi was make Happiness a 'local' resource instaed of a global one, but that didnt really address wide vs tall. The onlyl thing was that culture victory was a 'tall' empire goal. The only way to get a cultural victory was to be tall not wide. But EVERY OTHER victory condiition required a wide empire. You could not get a military or tech victory via a tall empire. The only exception was Vencie but even that is techncically 'wide' as it simply limits how 'fast' you can go wide, not that wide is penalized.

This is their fix for the 'steamroller' effect. Where you have basically 'won' because you effectively out man/out produce/etc all other civs and the rest of the game is jsut steamrolling the other civs into oblivion. Introducing massive positive feedback loops for conquests means that once you hit a certain point, you are just moving armies around for literally no other reason other than murdering other civs who have 0 chance of rebounding.

Most games don't allow this because if you can make a 'tall' empire, then by definiton you can extend those tactics to a 'wide' one. Then your empire is both tall AND wide. At which point smal tall empires, have no hope since wide empires will be tall as well. You have to introduce rubberbanding effects like "Corruption" in Civ4 to reduce the incremental improvments in having a larger and larger civilization (and note that in Civ4, one of the best considered games in the franchise, Corruption is a topic of HOT debate and not a panacea for wide vs tall)

All I want is the option to not colonize every single planet without falling completely behind in every single metric.  Right now the only reason not to conquer or colonize every planet possible is that I would have to spend time managing all these planets.  I don't need tall civilizations to be better than wide, but they should at least in some way be viable.

What's the point of different victory conditions if you reach them all the same way?  

The local happiness combined with # of cities unhappiness penalty, science penalty, and culture penalty made it so that it was very hard to have more than 4 or 5 cities.

 

I understand that you don't want players to have completely won by 1/3 of the way through the game, but int's out manning/out producing/etc. supposed to be how you win in a 4x game? There are other ways to address this problem without arbitrary civ-size caps. In fact, GalCiv II was very good at this with some of the  ways the AI reacted to you're becoming too powerful. Effective espionage is another great way to do this. I think there are more creative and fun ways to limit or slow steamrolling while still allowing players to have large empires with highly developed planets.

I always assumed that within a single game, you had to vary between going wide and tall depending on which phase of the game it was and which race you were playing. For example, you rush to expand, then you consolidate for a while, then you have a number of strategical options open to you: teching, trading, focusing on military buildup or making allies or going further the expansion phase with the extreme colonization tech.

This again varied depending on your civilization. The Yor could manage to go tall very very early in the game since they have (had?) such good early research and industrial buildings. After after that it would only make sense to go wide and expand through invasion since the later Yor tech were comparatively weak and the only way to compensate would be with an economy of scale.

Another civ like the Altarians and the Arcean, with their PQ advantage, could afford to go tall with a smaller number of planets.

Maybe I'm wrong.

I play wide in the sense i race to colonize anything I see, but tall in the fact that all but 5 or 6 of the nicest planets only have a starport and market center. Basically, Ill have two super manufacturing worlds, three or four researchers, and my capital.

I would very much like to see the number of habatiable planets reduced.  Too many 1 and 2 size planets.  Remove them, please. 

What about we give everyone twenty agents, they can act as spies, governors, generals, diplomats, business tycoons, rock stars whatever. They allow you to specializespecific planets or turn a limited number of planets into powerhouses.  Agents don't have to be limited to planets but can lead fleets or discretely undermine enemy production or alliances.

 A flat 20 for everyone gives smaller civilizations a fighting chance with multiple agents boosting single planets and extra spies whereas it limits massive empires to a single governor per planet to keep things running smooth.  Seems a more elegant system to flat corruption penalties.  Also gives a player more control.