To some extant you can compensate for lack of colonization by using arrays of economic starbases. You can substantially increase your production and research but they don't help increase your economy or population.

Population starbases are an interesting concept, but ringworld/dyson sphere's would need a complete revamp of the morale structure to have any real benefit.

I prefer a linear tech tree. It gets to be a pain to figure out what techs you need to get a tech you want once you add more than one tech as a prerequisite. However, I agree that there should be more variety of things to research.

I've only had experience with MOO3, the point of which seemed to be to hit the turn button until the end of the game and see how well your governors did. I'm awful glad GCII is nothing like that.

First I would like to say that as someone who has owned all three MOOs , that 2 was the best of the lot. In 1 I liked the fact you have to rearch colony type techs,and in 3 I liked the fact you can make defence bases to your own specs. Although the large amount of micromanagement was a bit of an overkill in 3. Don't get me wrong 1 is great for its simple play ,and 3 is good for the tight butt micromanagers out there. It's just that 2 gives you that happy medium. In all three the tech trees where pretty much the same linear type, although you could adjust the pace of the sub class research. The fact is this is not MOO1,2,or 3. What it is imho is the best successor, even if it is from a different company, to MOO.

Sylverlokk
The idea of population starbases for an isolationist civ is just not going to work in the game. You have to colonize planets or die. If all your population is on starbases if and when they are, and they will be, destroyed. Then where is your population? Back down to your home planet, you start over, sorry about that.

Mumblefratz

To some extant you can compensate for lack of colonization by using arrays of economic starbases. You can substantially increase your production and research but they don't help increase your economy or population

Your right but they don't do anything if it's not near a colony.



ALL HAIL THE MIGHTY DEVS!!!

With the tech tree, I think that it is kind of strange that all races get the same techs mostly. I think that the races should develop in different ways and the only way of getting special techs that only other races have access to would be by stealing, spying or trading. I also like the idea of a tech that can terraform a 0 class planet into a habitable one.

If I am not mistaken, the DA expansion will be extending the tech tree somewhat, and that certain races will get special abilities, however I am unsure as to the extent.

I find that using economy starbases helps me to avoid unneccessary expansion. For the life of me, I haven't figured out how to do the "colony rush" without going completely broke. So I'm extremely dependant on them in the early game to stay competitive (painful setting/large or huge map).

I like the idea of having techs that expand production for more isolationist civs. Maybe techs that give bonuses to only a set number of planets? Or a limited number of uber-forge starbases?

At least in the early parts of the game, making the link between population and production would also help.

As it stands, GalCiv2 rewards only the same linear path of expansion. I wouldn't say its unbalancing, but after a while every game starts to play the same.

I think the colony techs in DA will help, though I also think there should be more options for "domestic" policy. As it stands, I really feel that the only viable strategy in the higher levels of GalCiv2 is to expand, expand, expand.

This doesn't compare well to a game like CivIV, where you have more options in how you want to develop.

Warning: I started typing, and just couldn't stop...

I think the key to doing something like this is some sort of "infinitely upgradeable" economic system.

In all current strategy games, it's standard operating procedure to max out your planets/cities at any given tech level. You build everything you can build, until the planet is packed with everything and producing at 100% of its potential. You can research techs which raise that limit, but all you do is spend a few turns upgrading everything, and then you're maxed out again. The only way to raise your max is to grab new territory.

Instead, imagine a system where you can invest in the further development of your planet, but with no upper limit. Pouring resources into building a planet's infrastructure will keep increasing its value. The trade-off is that you aren't pouring resources into grabbing more planets.

With a system like that (if properly balanced) you would have to choose between grabbing lots of territory and having it all be relatively low quality, or focusing on a small number of planets and having them all become high quality.

The problem is: If you grab twice as many planets, won't you have twice as many resources available, and can thus upgrade all of your planets anyway, and be ahead of the guy that didn't grab that many?

The answer, perhaps, is something I'd really like to see done in a 4X space strategy game. I want your homeworld to mean something. It's the planet your race spent countless millenia growing up on, developing a huge population and a massive industry. I don't like the idea that it's so easy to take a completely empty planet and quickly turn it into something comparable to your homeworld.

A way to do this:

- The amount of population you can transport to new planets is a tiny fraction of the billions of people on your planet. In addition, unless they're fruit flies, they won't ever breed fast enough to get anything close to your homeworld's population.
- Your tax revenue comes from population, so how much land you grab won't really affect it. 99% of it is coming from tax policies on your homeworld population (plus trade, tech levels, and other things not related to how many colonies you have).
- The reason you are grabbing planets and establishing colonies is a) resource extraction (after all those millenia, your homeworld is depleted), setting up research colonies (you can't sit home and research, you need to do research "in the field" - just as we are doing in real life), and of course c) military bases (outposts, ship factories, etc.)

All of your colonies would thus still be essential to supporting the further development of your civilization, but your homeworld would be the jewel in the crown (and you don't want to lose it!!). It's your cash cow.

Getting back to the "infinitely upgradeable" economic idea, the mechanics of the game could then either let you invest resources in further developing your existing colonies to improve their resource extraction, research, manufacturing etc. or in creating new colonies. Those resources, being generated by your homeworld as taxes, wouldn't be affected by how many colonies you have. The guy who grabs lots of planets still has roughly the same financial income from taxes as the guy who only grabbed a few, and they'll be spread more thinly over all his colonies. The guy who only grabbed a few planets can focus his money on turning them all into quite powerful colonies.

So, if properly balanced, choosing either path would get you to roughly the same economic level for your civilization, but in entirely different ways. (Maybe the "grab lots of planets" strategy would have to give you a slight edge, because it's more difficult to defend a larger number of planets).

Anyway, enough babbling...

@ Cauldyth

Ok. I had the same problem as you. Started typing and couldn't shut up.

What you're saying makes sense. Good ideas.

It vibes with how things have played historically. Take the British empire for example. They had their colonies in America and all over the world, but their role was mostly to supply resources. The periphery feeds the center.

You know, I think it would actually be simple to make a game were colonies are appendages of the homeworld rather then self-contained entities. It's just a matter or shifting production from a dispersed network to a more consolidated one. At least initially.

But I think you could add a whole new dynamic to this type of game, by allowing the colonies to eventually develop in a "homeworld"-like way. As they do so they become more independant, forcing the imperial rulers to focus on domestic policies or risk revolution.

And of course, the threat of revolution would be very real because it would deprive the homeworld of important-- I'm thinking unique-- resources.

Throw in some other imperial powers who are in competition with your own. They're doing what they can to destabalize your empire. And occassionally they're launching full-out wars.

Throw in a system to mimic economic warfare while you're at it. Also throw in some ideological constraints: for example, a fascist empire would have to use oppression instead of democracy to fight instability.

The game would flow completely differant. In the early-game you would be focused on balancing expansion and development. In the mid-game you'd focus on development and warding off rivals. And in the late-game you'd have to focus on stability while fending off other powers. Essentially, you'd be fighting to prevent what you've built from disintegrating.

And at that point you're way-the-hell out of GalCiv2 territory. But I would be still be ecstatic to see it in GalCiv3.

On the MOOs points, I agree that 2 was the best of the set and that GCII is the best of the new SF 4X genre. I'm stoked that DA will offer something like the MOO environment functions, and have some hopes that it might even include the mixed-population system (the total extermination aspect of GCII invasions seems limited to me).

To the duo who type lots, I also am waiting (as patiently as I can) for a 4X game that includes but is not limited to 18th-19th century mercantilist expansion as the core model. What strikes me as the elephant in the room for this discussion and several others I've seen around here is Time. I suspect that the new/improved feature desires that many of us share must await a real revolution in how time is addressed in 4X games.

In addition to being a 4X fan from well before the term was coined, I'm a social scientist and I read a great deal of science fiction. To date, it seems like time-related issues are perhaps the greatest overall weakness of 4x. It began with the basic wackiness of your ruler "personas" in Civilization living for as much as 6,000 years and retaining significant autocratic power the whole time.

In GCII, we have the "end game" of a multi-millenia long story wrapping up in just a few years, with the key players essentially going from zero to godhood in that short span. Little details associated with that (e.g. the truly ludicrous pop growth speed) vex me, so I mostly try to ignore the "calendar" and think of GCII turns as far more than a week.

I've begun wondering if the "phases problem" might not be the roots of a good solution--namely, a time modeling system that has built-in phases that are smarter versions of the way the Civ series makes turns increasingly shorter in "real" time. A structure like that might also be able to add variety by enabling "isolationist" AI players to start at different levels of development or by enabling players to include "development level" in the basic difficulty settings at game start.

but I suppose if you've been playing this type of game for years, it would get a bit cliche.

This describes me I suppose, playing a isolationist race would be interesting, the arch manipulater for example, plays other races off each another, has unique techs (cloaking/espionage etc...), it would add a different aspect to the game.

There's always some aspect of the game that's incompatible with any particular choice [about timescales].

Maybe after the Evil Empire in Redmond has driven us all to spend even more unnecessary money on upgrades, we'll see games that are basically a well-integrated set of sub-games with internally consistent time schemes.

I'd *love* a galactic empire game where the big map moved at a pace of years, decades, or even centuries and you shifted to a whole different set of nested timeframes to handle things like diplomacy, trade, internal politics, and military conflict. Mind you, I'm pretty sure that even if I had coding skills, that idea might make my skin crawl.