Limiting Colony Spam?

Well, just to give you the devil's advocate view - one of the things I disliked greatly with Civ V (and the reason I went back to and stayed with IV) was some of the mechanics you mentioned. I hated them....

Not saying there couldn't be mechanics to make a smaller empire a viable option - and at this stage, with no info on gameplay, all we can do is speculate on GalCiv III.

I do remember creating a custom race in GalCiv II built around rapid expansion, only to find the AI (without all the bonuses I had paid for in my race!) beat me to all the good planets anyway...  :)  So, yeah - adjustments are probably called for; I'd just prefer something short of a global mechanic to make a small start a viable strat.

Yes, please. Damned Thalans. There should be an over-extension mechanic to limit the amount of planets you can just gobble up at once. The early colony rush/phase is okay, but there needs to be a limit so that I don't get the Thalan Empire just spamming colony ships in all directions and being the giant, pink blob (although fighting against the giant pink blob was a bit grindy at times, it made for some great "small empire takes on the big, evil empire" storytelling). 

So yeah, some over-extension mechanics would be good; and it would make sense. 

The AI may be good at colony spamming but that's not an optimal strategy in the early game.  It's impossible to do research, continually build colony ships and continually add new colonies without going into the red.  The AI has to raise taxes and reduce its rate of production as it gets into a loss-making situation.

The human player on the other hand can make more optimal choices, gaining fewer colonies but securing a good position and having less down time and having a better population growth rate.

It's true that the AI with a greater number of colonies will then have an economic peak as its colonies mature and start producing lots of taxes, but they have lots of colonies that are poorly defended, have a poor PQ and are isolated from the rest of their space.  They don't have the positional advantage that the human player does.

Like in chess, position is everything.  If my troop transports are two turns away from one of your colonies, you should be worried about an imminent attack.  If they're twelve turns away, you have ample time to muster a defence and/or intercept them.

Well put by both sides of the issue. I think there is merit for some outside pressure to expand but there needs to be balance so that rapid expansion is not the over whelming main focus of the game. It all comes down to balance, which by the way I think was done remarkably well in the past with both Gal I and Gal II. Can't wait to see what the team comes up with.

What if planets could be colonized by multiple factions, like different continents?  then something later in the game could decide who gets the planet, such as culture or the "UN".  When races are young, they are hardly in a position to fight space wars, and they hardly need a whole planet.

If you recall there were strategies in GC2 that allowed you to have all the planets in the game (bar 1) within year zero without colonizing more than 1 other planet. Obviously these were extreme game mechanics tested out to the nth degree, but even dialed down, one could be in the top 3 in DA/ToA in year 1 by only colonizing a few worlds.
It's all about how you structure your game play.

I agree the AI were a machine in the colony rush phase, but on the lesser difficulties, i think painful and below, they were quite sedate. At suicidal i believe the AI knew the location of every planet.

I think the fact GC3 is being coded specifically for 64bit machines will allow for sufficiently large maps that even with 9 AI (assuming its the same as GC2) you will be able to net yourself a decent enough slice of the pie.

I liked the colony rush in GalCiv 2. I'm quite good at competing with the AI. I may not get a large number of normal planets at the start, but I could pace myself. I usually got most of the extreme worlds at the end (even when competing with civs that started out with extreme worlds techs), and have a good military might rating to boot.

I was able to beat the AI to a lot of good colonies in GC2 by giving my colony ships lots of engines.  Same with constructors for building outposts on resources.

Only if you let them Neilo   Even without the alternative methods of winning the colony rush, you could out-pace any / all of the AIs on suicidal as long as you could keep your economy up.

It is kind of the point of a 4X early game strategy though! Will be interesting to see how they handle this in GC3, knowing what they do about how the player base adapted in GC2. Multiplayer should also put a different slant on things with no AIs to exploit

Outcolonizing a single one, beating the worst?  Piece of cake.  Outcolonizing each one individually, beating the best?  No sweat.  Outcolonizing more than one, combined?  Eminently doable.  Outcolonizing all of them, combined?  Now that required a bit more advanced strategy

Being as the colony rush was the main portion of the game I enjoyed, I'd hate to see it be toned down too drastically, but I can see some of the points that are being made.

Good to see you, Mag.

Hey Sole - good to see you too!

I agree - the colony rush was the main portion of the game I enjoyed too. Advanced strategy... more a case of optimal and micro-managed for me as I preferred to do my colonising the old fashioned way (yes, building colony ships and actually sending them to planets, lol). Was fun keeping track of which planets had inbound colonisers on a gigantic map and upwards of 200 colonisers in flight.

Kind of satisfying to pick up 80%+ of the available real estate against 9 suicidal AIs in a traditional rush, without a shot being fired. 

Now, now.  Let's not make Neilo feel too bad!  :P

As did I.  Why bother letting the AI colonize the planets, when I can do it faster?  ;)  Actually rather enjoyed Hive for such a game, but Breeder's pop growth is almost too overpowered not to use.

Very satisfying, you mean.

the real answer is not to add fake penalties and arbitrary modifiers, but rather to put an AI in the game that actually knows how to punish you for overexpanding

I think EU IV dealt with the spam approach in an interesting way by assigning 'overextension' penalties according to distance from home countries, whether or not the province was a core, etc. You can lower the overextension naturally over time or by assigning resources against it or by events. But perhaps some ways of dealing with the spam without global prohibitions 

That much is true, but that's no reason to make the colony rush worse for the player.  What we need, as always, is to make the AI better.  As you said, anything below Painful is comparatively a cakewalk (pun intended) once one has played the game for a while.  For instance, I enjoyed DL greatly, and enjoyed DA even more once I got used to it, but there's no denying that almost all of the changes when going from DL to DA were designed to make it harder on the player (see: engine nerf), because it was deemed too difficult to get the AI to use everything properly.  Nor will I deny that at least some of those changes were good for the game as a whole-but I still take issue with the design philosophy.

Well, in reply #3312 in the ToE thread (link will only work if you're not logged in-just reported problem here), Mumble begs to differ  But whether I'm first or second, Mag's rush was always the bar to beat, for me.  It's one of the things that pushed me as far as I went, mechanics wise-so credit where credit is due.

As for your question of why to straight-up colonize yourself, the reason is rather simple: The AI is bad at building  I'd much rather get the planet myself, build it up myself, make more money, and have pop maxed much earlier, thank you very much.  :)  But then again that's how I've always played, from the start, because that's what's fun for me, haha.

I enjoy the colony rush period of a game, and wouldnt want to see it made even easier than in GC2.  It is after all a 4x game, with expansion being one of the major components.  In any case, no matter how difficult it might be construed inititally, SoleSoul and Magnumaniac should break it in no time at all.

The "colony rush" is a main core of Galactic Civilizations. It's even part of the story.

... and credit also has to go to the other guys who spent many many hours play-testing theories of how to get that 1st / 2nd / 100th coloniser out of the shipyard 1 turn earlier. Mumble and Purge were a key part of that in the early days of DL.

Maybe we'll get to try things out in a head-to-head one day in GC3 - although if it's anything like the GC2 mechanics it could be a long game (I seem to recall spending 4+ hours on some turns) 

KP!!!!! Greetings sir!!!

Making sure Diplomacy cant be so utterly abused would be key to balance.

Good to see old faces here.  Yes you could out do the AI push those colony ships out and grab those goody huts and hope you balance your econ. Your on edge until OH YA LOTTERY WOOT MORE SHIPS NOW! MY COLONY MINE!

See this is the weird part, I enjoyed the colony rush of GCII use up Colony ships and colony stage was a game of its own but I also like the Sots games ie you establish colonies and its your choice to support them or move on but don't over extend yourself or this happens- well shit captain hands scientists pocket change for research and shipyards gather dust and randoms ruin your day. And the neighbors beat you to death.

I like them both...

This. For a conventional colony rush nothing beat Diplomat. I'd often spend a year or more losing 1000 bc a turn and never run out of money. Not to mention being able to cripple enemy ship construction by buying all their scouts and forcing them to rebuild them (and not coincidentally upgrading all those scouts into colony ships to swipe planets out from under the people you bought the ship from!)

Although, if they're changing the colony rush, they also need to change the biggest reason behind the colony rush - the AI never got random events while colonizing, so on average a planet would be higher quality if the player settled it rather than letting an AI settle and later buying it from them.

The colony rush made sense given the game's lore.

One weird solution off the top of my head-  powerful mid-game buildings that have a drawback of adding unrest of other planets in your empire when you build them (maybe even distance based).  Maybe economic/military capitals could work like this.  So tall empires would benefit from the buildings, wide empires would have a drawbacks.

Another alternative would be to have capitals provide their bonuses, but provide penalties to other planets based on how far they are from a capital.  

The downside is this system might mimic Civ 3's inefficiency, but Elemental-style unrest was worse.

Do we like it though? I don't much myself.