PRDX517

Civ 4 had a "bureaucracy" mechanic that worked to limit city spam. Basically, each new city introduced a non-linear, cumulative econ penalty on the whole civilization. Each additional colony would consume more money than it produced until it had time to develop. This makes some intuitive sense: overexpansion crashes your economy. Just ask the Romans. In that game tech eventually made your economy more productive and your civilization could tolerate a higher penalty. I can also imagine

I haven't played the beta. I played GalCiv 3, but didn't like it much. I played GalCiv 2 a lot. So with my lack of cred in mind: "Realism" is overrated in games, but it does help make systems intuitive. In this case, why not make the weapons / defenses "realistic" and then balance tweak based on the results? Point defenses should be very effective against missiles, but expensive and fairly advanced technology, just like they are in real life. They shouldn't really work against