I don't like this idea at all. The initial land grab pahse of GC2 is the most boring part of the game. Unlike Civ4 there isn't surrounding territory to worry about or resources nearby or if the city is coastal or the distance to your capital, it's just get as many planets as you can asap. I mean sure you can slow down the expansion, but why? You really want to drag out colonizing planets and getting them to usefulness? I think this was a very interesting design choice, the inital 5000 BC gets your empire up and pumping out warships fast.

Basic Logistics being very easy to research makes it trivial but beyond that the logistics techs get expensive. If you don't get the next logistics fast enough then the planets get close to being unusuable because you can't build basic buildings on a planet, only the upgraded versions. Actually all you are doing is spearating it into two colony rush phases, bleh.

Frogboys statement that resources are = or + to planets is correct, however. Depending on your difficulty level

1. the AI already has a head start in terms of Scouts/Planets
2 the AI already KNOWS where they are...You have to first build the scouts, find the resources then build a constructor which does 3pcs per turn and get it out there.
3. By the time you do ALL of that the AI will have a decidedly serious planetary influence advantage.
4. the AI is NOT I repeat NOT bound by the same range limitatiions that you are.....of this I can prove reguardless of what the fan bois say.

Since for me it seems that if I play on normal level...the AI is building Eco/manufacturing Capitals and trade goods before I can even get my first factory built.

Here is how I do it

1. I play with planets on a tight cluster.
2. all research abilities maxed the left over i do to economy in the setup
3. make a mad dash to get nearby planets and the n research the heck out....staying as neutral as possible unless a 20+ planety quality bonus or something is offered.
4. build my trade routes
5. bide my time/avoid war
6 find the weakest civ with the most resources
7. build influence bases around civs and revolt take nearby planets
8 once I have a sizeable planet base, I build a few defensive ships
then I See whos allied with who. trade embargo the civ with planets under my area of influence and the skulls soon appear.
9. attack an seize the resources i need then. then usually they soon seek a peace treaty
wash rinse repeat

The last post by the bovine cannibal is certainly an interesting one. I agree that fitting it in to GalCiv2 would essentially change the dynamics of the early game to a huge extent. Though it does make sense that as new habitable planets are found people would gradually move over to them. An addition to that thought would be that you can only build ships on planets that you are essentially in near or complete control of, like your homeworld. Possibly a new UP resolution about a tax on foreigners living within the area of influence of another civ.

This also brings back the idea of destabilization spending on such planets, like the Drath wouldn't want to fund a covert Drengin mafia on a joint Drengin/Altarian planet. IE state sponsored terrorism to 'convince' those Altarians that life was better back on Altaria. Sure the Drengins get another planet, but hey who do they have to thank, all those kindly Drath gun-runners.

One more thing, doesn't the event 'Pro-Iconian activists have rushed the streets and begun to terrorize the inhabitants of the Little Korx section on (insert planet name here) causing the Korx government to advise it's citizens to return home to more secure Korx planets' Doesn't that sound like fun? A result of this would be something like increased Iconian influence on that planet, a complete abandonment of it by the Korx, and an increased Korx presence on another planet.

Early exploration and expansion is a core fundamental part of the genre. Why limit early expansion, especially in a space based 4X like GalCiv2 where there is always a limited number of habital worlds. It's not like you can just colonize endlessly.

I can see hindering expansion in a game like Civilzation, because there is a lot of landmass and you can build a huge number of cities just about anywhere - and it can be beyond ridiculous to pump out settlers nonstop. Civ doesn't have a limited number of areas to "colonize" (until the entire map is filled at least, which is what happens eventually.)

IMO, logistics has nothing to do with number of planets. You could have some other tech be a limiting factor on empire size, if you must make all players into clones. For example in RoN (not a TBS game but it's not a typical RTS either, it's kinda of an RTS/Civ hybrid) there is a civic tech category and you're number of cities is limited by your civics level. But I don't think this is appropriate.

What is appropriate is gearing up your empire to maximize early expansion. It's a race. It's a fun part of the game. If you don't enjoy that part of the game then...not sure what to tell you.

Here's an idea, although I don't know how this would play out in practice. For someone who doesn't want to do the colony rush, what if there was a new tech tree for building artificial space habitats? It would be a new type of starbase, basically.... something like an O'Neill Cylinder with room for population growth and slots for buildings. You'd build it with a constructor, and upgrade it over time, maybe eventually reaching the Halo, Ringworld, or Dyson Sphere phases (although the latter two would be game unbalancing.... think of the potential tax income!).

This would allow territorial expansion into sectors that were devoid of habitable planets, which could be an interesting way to use those areas.

For those who don't like land-grab, why not just a deathmatch mode? Every planet starts out colonized.

I want to pipe in that I like the tying max colony number to a tech. Logistics is fine, and I like that, becasue the civ that races just to logistics will end up being handicapped in terms of trade, weapon tech, etc. I like it a lot.

And I do think the way it is is HIGHLY problematic becasue it is just too random. If you get lucky and in a good location, it makes it a CAKEWALK.

some of the rebuttals have implied that the author and others liek myself are NOT emphasizing early production for colony ships. that is not the case. I do the 100% social for two factories, buy an extra colony, and then 100% military for 4-5 colony ships. Its just way too luck dependent on the number of colonizable worlds on my half of the map.

Personally I think the number of colonys shoudl be tied to some government -type tech, or your new colonys will likely revolt. THis would provide the wonderful guns-and-butter descision making we all love.

I hope stardock considers this reasonable request!

MG

The "initial colony" building has a relatively high upkeep cost (i think 25bc or so). What if this were increased substantially, or additional penalties were added (like -50% production, -80% income, etc)? This would be a substantial disincentive to rapid expansion. You could also add a chain of maybe 10 upgrades, that gradually bring it back down to the normal base cost. Make them relatively, cheap, but since you can't upgrade it again until the previous upgrade is done, it would make the colony take 10 or 20 turns to get up to speed. If one tried to expand too quickly, the increased upkeep costs (or lack of income from the new planets to offset this) would cripple you fairly quickly. However, eventually the upkeep would come down to the current rate.

I think two other factors exacerbate the importance of the initial rush.

It takes a fairly long amount of time to get up to the technology point that you can capture a planet (planetary invasion). By that time, the initially colonized planets will have a large enough population that they can't be taken without a substantial effort. So basically all you need to do is run a colony ship to a planet, and it's home free for a long while. Two things could possibly help here, either enabling earlier conquest somehow, or slowing the growth of early planets. Perhaps as mentioned above, the growth rate could be penalized for the first 10 (just to throw a number out there) turns or so, this would prevent the planet from being too firmly entrenched. You could allow blocking of colonization by allowing ships to enter orbit around uncontested planets and prevent colony ships from landing. This would allow players to still stake out planets in a slightly less permanent fashion. To allow easier conquest, perhaps
colonies below a certain age or size could be conquered by colony ships, rather than troop transports. The logic being that before a colony has some basic infrastructure built, it is poorly defended and can be overrun even by non-professional forces.

The flat population growth also makes it much easier to colonize rapidly. Since planets grow at a base rate of 200k, regardless of size, that means you aren't limited by population as far as rate of colonization. It doesn't make sense that populations would double in a week (or more than double if is jumps from say 10k to 210k). If you had to create colonies with smaller initial populations (say 10k or 50k) and combined this with easier conquest of small or new colonies as mentioned above, there would be some balance required between fast colonization and quality colonization. Slowing down population growth would also make it harder to go into massive debt early on and count on rapid tax base growth to bail you out.

I'm not clear on how very low population effects production, research, etc. Do improvements need a certain number of citizens to operate? Maybe this would make more sense than 10 upgrading versions of the initial colony tile. If the initial colony operated at 100% with 500k plus people, 50% with 250k or something like that, with maybe a minimum of 10% with 50k or below....

Anyway, nuff rambling. It's just I agree that it's frustrating that such a small percentage of the game has such a huge impact on the initial outcome.

Here is my list of changes that would "fix" colony rushing. Of course all comments are welcome, and I hope that Stardock is reading =]:

1) Fix population growth. Deciding to ship off a billion colonists should be quite painful to the supplying colony.

2) Fix population growth. Here's another reason. There should be some benefit to the long-term development of the new colony, providing a compelling case to choose 500 million or a billion colonists vs the current standard of 100 million or fewer. If a player chooses a very small initial population, it should take a much longer time to grow. A modified (capped?) exponential growth rate would probably be best here.

3) There should be an increased benefit of a higher population for planet production. One possibility: factories should only be considered "fully staffed" when there are 1 billion colonists available per factory on the planet. Anything less than that would reduce production linearly. Since by endgame there are usually many more than 1 billion population per factory on planets, this should not be something that the player has to worry about for his established colonies (unless he completely neglects farms), only during initial expansion and planet conquest.

Together, these would make the decision to launch a colony ship a more difficult one. To kickstart a strong colony, it would require many more colonists than now. The decision to send that many colonists would need to be balanced against more noticeable effects on the home colony.

As always, values like population growth rates and various thresholds can be tweaked to achieve the "best" gameplay balance of the push to colonize versus the need to keep the colonists at the home planet. Optimally, the best strategies would colonize planets in descending quality order as the game progresses, leaving low-quality ones open until much later in the game, when there are excess populations.

Personally I think getting resources is as if not more important than getting too many planets.

Maybe this is just me, but I've found this is 100% true in 1-on-1 and 100% false in anything larger. In 1-on-1 I get rocked by my opponent if he gets a couple resources and pushes his early lead. But in a larger galaxy with more civilizations, colonies are king. More colonies = more research = more transports = eliminate anyone who dares take a resource near you and take it yourself. I'm playing a Gigantic with 9 opponents, and getting four colonies as opposed to my opponents' average of two has led to me owning nearly half the galaxy and having eliminated four other civilizations in about 3 game years. Granted, they're on Bright and not Intelligent yet, but it still seems that more colonies means more better in a very concrete way.

In response to the general feeling of the thread, though, I'm fine with that. I need every advantage I can get when my general strategy tends to be Kill Everyone, and being able to build my strategy around that (for instance, my custom civ starts with Stellar Cartography) gives me a fighting chance. GalCiv 2 is the first 4X game I've ever won on any difficulty via military strength, and I've been playing them since Civ 1. Either that means it's more suited to my mode of thought, or it's balanced in a way I've been able to understand.

The problem for me isn't that an early desperate landgrab is a viable strategy (I quite enjoy the random mad excitement), the problem is that it is the ONLY viable early strategy. There should be a balance to that part of the game, just as there is to the latter stages, it should be possible to go for one of three or four different strategies that all would have their problems and advantages:

1) There should be a "military strategy" in the early game. If Planetary Invasion was a cheaper tech it would be possible to build up an early game navy of transports and scouts and simply grab the good planets from the hands of those that have spent their resources discovering and developing them. This would force land-grabbers to balance the use of ressources between expansion and defense.

2) There should be an "economic" strategy where your early focus would be getting the good trade routes and developing valuable trade goods (these things could be made a much larger part of the game, perhaps in a mod) and building up your economy and/or productivity to dominate the other civs financially (has anyone else noticed the viability of buying expensive techs from other civs and reselling them for profit to everybody else in the galaxy? One can make trillions off of the minor races alone!) Why not let civs place orders for goods and services with other civs? I think it would be cool if I could place an order with e.g. the Alterians to build entertainment centers on my worlds if they happened to be really productive and I happened to be filthy rich!

3) There should be a "tech" strategy. All those resources that goes into early colonyship production should give much greater strategic reward if funnelled into getting an early technological edge. The monopoly on certain goods and techs could be made far more important (i.e. a civ could develop and gain a monopoly on something that no one else could do without and would have to give up some of that early gained territory in trade for)

Anyway, these are loose ideas. The important thing is that players/ai's should have important early descisions to make other than where to send those precious ships.

benjamin, that's more or less how it works in civ4, like I said before--
if more planets = insane upkeep fees, then colonizing more straight away would put you in a bad position at first but if you survive you might be stronger much later on, but if you don't overexpand you can use 100% spending and focus on tech or military or whatever you want

What I liked especially in civ4 is that if you over-expanded, your economy will simply grind to a complete halt and you'd die.
you could push it, but at some point it would kill you outright.. you won't just be behind on tech than everyone else, you'll have NO tech research and no nothing