Steady Challenge and Expansion Penalties

I don't want to be penalized for going wide.  Colony maintenance and a higher colony ship cost would be fine.  Seriously how does a ship holding 5 billion people cost only marginally more than a scout ship?

I definitely don't want to be penalized... too much. A little more pacing in colonization would be quite nice; right now it's just RUSH without strategy.

Positive example of how this was done: Civ 4. New cities were quite a drain on the pocketbooks, but could eventually be made self sufficient or even profitable with the right infrastructure.

Negative example: Civ 5. Going wide is penalized with incredibly arbitrary and harsh penalties; increased science costs, decreased happiness civ-wide, decreased social policy progression, wonders being costlier.. so  much so it felt like I was fighting the developers trying to play that game; they were smacking my wrist every dozen turns or so with a new arbitrary punishment.

I don't want arbitrary penalties just because I colonize a new planet. Endless Legend has something like this and I hate it. Increase colony maintenance and colony modules' manufacturing cost, sure I can live with that.

Please take into account that there are some things not in the game yet that will slow down expansion, extreme planets and pirates.

Early game, I don't mind the varied starts, it makes every game different, I don't need the exact same balance each time.

Mid game, I agree to an extent to help races from running away too much, especially very productive ones.

Minor races will help slow this, I hope, claiming a planet and possibly a system for themselves. If you settle in their system I hope they drive you out of it, at least till later game. Give minor races some nice defensive ships, but poor offensive is how i'd do it, with perhaps military starbases backing them up.

UP could vote on this to make colonies more expensive mid game. Either races falling behind might agree(to stop anyone falling further), or races way out in front might agree (to stop anyone catching up), so it'd be down to personal player preference on when to vote. The AI could use the tech age as a base for it's vote, or how many planets are left in the galaxy, or it's size relation to its neighbors in the early game, or if its currently in too many wars to colonize so it'd rather slow everyone down. You could also do it via ideology, the cost be associated with making colonists lives more comfortable.

Better enemy AI not liking you colonizing right on its borders, it should warn you about this directly, especially the expansionist type races, Dregin, or Human not to come too close.

More AI players will help with this, as essentially you'll have settled all there is peacefully to settle, unless we get to use the dead planets for outposts or some such. I hope some mechanic uses them in the end, pirates, minor races or mercenary groups etc.

Neutral zones could be established diplomatically in the UP or between individual races, to allow room between races.

[accidental duplicate post - mea culpa]

Hell no, this isn't remotely similar to civ. If there is a penalty for for making a city on the other side of the globe, how will I be able to make a galactic empire over thousands of light years?!? There is no logical argument that justifies expansion penalties in this game. And none of your suggestions of maintenance would be a fix to this fallacy of a issue, for it would be solved when the colony develops.

The ideas listed are the apex of...oh I'll stop now.

DARCA '_;

So... are you advocating making the outcome of the game almost entirely dependent on the first 50 turns of expansion... because of realism?

Anyway, new interstellar colonies probably wouldn't be self sufficient - at least, not if you wanted them to develop at a reasonable pace.

Quoting Tohron, reply 8

Quoting DARCA1213,

reply 7

Hell no, this isn't remotely similar to civ. If there is a penalty for for making a city on the other side of the globe, how will I be able to make a galactic empire over thousands of light years?!? There is no logical argument that justifies expansion penalties in this game. And none of your suggestions of maintenance would be a fix to this fallacy of a issue, for it would be solved when the colony develops.

The ideas listed are the apex of...oh I'll stop now.

 

So... are you advocating making the outcome of the game almost entirely dependent on the first 50 turns of expansion... because of realism?

Anyway, new interstellar colonies probably wouldn't be self sufficient - at least, not if you wanted them to develop at a reasonable pace.

That reasoning is continuation of a completely flawed and illogic argument to fix a problem that does not exist outside ones mind.

Asymmetric starts are just an intrinsic feature of 4X-like games.  I don't know of any mechanism that balances it well.  If it really matters, enforce identical home systems, or identical 30-hex-radius regional templates.  But that gets boring, too, in other ways.

I think there are two separate issues here, which we should take care not to entangle.

1. New colonies are too self-sufficient.  This may encourage spamming (by not punishing it).
2. Asymmetric start compounds early colony-spam advantage.

Solving #1 doesn't necessarily solve #2.  If everybody pays the same extra pain to bootstrap their colonies, that just lowers the exponent of the growth, but doesn't change the exponential nature.

First, we can envision some costs for #1.  (All of these tend to make it more tedious to reach the fully-colonized-ZOC midgame state, which may contradict Paul's vision for where he wants GC3 gameplay to focus.  Consider Stardock's other space colony management game, where you burn your 50-100 hours of brainpower to get one colony profitable.  That might appeal, too, but it's simply a different niche of game.)

• Colony as baby.  It can grow on its own, in ~50 turns.  Or, it can import more resources, shipments, colonists, etc. for ~10 turns.  Colonies below some critical thresholds can fail.
• Bad: more micro.  So we need powerful abstractions.  Maybe create colony support as a trade-route-like link between planets?  It represents some fleet of civilian tankers, shippers, transports, etc.  In game terms, it becomes a separate slider of manuf/food/bc that you route into the baby's bottomless maw.
• Colony as many ongoing buildables.  Barebones Colony Capital gives few bonuses, but accepts add-on modules.  You can build those modules elsewhere, then send them later.  (Or, have the colony build its own.)  Bad: Now you spam colony-pieces, and your game becomes Amazon in space.

As for #2, it is not so simple as saying that more colonies makes you stronger.  This could be addressed by making techs and ship combat relatively insensitive to colony distribution, so that a 2-v-1 colony advantage can still get wiped out by a sharp attack.  Or, a player who sees that she has fewer planet resources will choose other tech/diplomacy/victory paths that de-emphasize sheer dumb production.

I dunno; evidently it is an unsolved problem across the 4X genre.  I'd rather GC3 first be a fun game with many interesting choices and few artificial restrictions, and not try to impose some arbitrary notion of fairness with a heavy hand.  Stardock is, after all, the game company of asymmetric power imbalances

Also, I think Paul's vision of a typical GC3 game is:

1. All races colonize all nearby planets.
2. All players' ZOCs grow until they merge into Voronoi ridges.
3. All players assemble ginormous fleets with different roles, capabilities, augments, etc.
4. Fleets fight and die so often that a smart player can evolve his fleet compositions over time to react to his opponent's compositions.
5. Somebody wins.

Paul's eyes light up when he talks about #3 and #4.  #1 seems like a chore to him; he takes one glance per planet, queues up 10 builds, and ignores it thereafter.  So I kind of doubt that GC3 will add more complexity to #1.

I've heard it talked about civilization likes small maps. My vision of 1,400 stars say the bigger the better. I like what civilization 4 did for city management as far as the air keeping up, but as far as colony management vs city management civilization 4 did a way better job. At least I wwasn't limited on what I can build. Galactic civilization wouldn't work for this because of limited colony management. No one likes small maps. I think the way galactic civilizations 2 handled this was fine, only if the air could keep up with me. I keep saying that galactic civilizations need better colony management. However they do this is fine as long the air can keep up.

I'm trying not to say L2P, but overcoming a poor start through good planning, management, and aggression is one of the great joys of 4x imo.

That being said, one thing that might help this issue without being an expansion penalty, would be to make growth increase with population. This would encourage players not to spread their population too thin and serve as a natural stall to an empire that expands quickly. The main issue with this idea I see is that if someone unaware the mechanic does spread their population super thin the game could become very unfun.

The thing is, you can't overcome a poor start through excellent strategy if the person who got a great start gets three times as much territory as you because their more numerous early colonies were able to support a second-wave expansion rush that claimed much of the map before you could research anything to contest them.  And because of the current mechanics, three times the territory translates into three times the production research, and wealth.  There's a limit to how much good strategy can overcome.

In order to have the fun of overcoming a poor start, the game's exponential growth must be dampened enough so that whoever pulls ahead early doesn't start gaining ground so much faster than everyone else that it becomes nearly impossible/impossible to catch up.

Right now, the exponential curve is just to steep.  I play vs. Godlike AI, and all the games I've had soon devolve into me playing around vs. opponents who have way less territory than me, and don't have a prayer of contesting my runaway growth.

Please, there is almost no difference in AI difficulties right now. Don't pat yourself on the back, godlike in this is barely stronger then Normal in galciv 2.

That being said, yes runaway civs can be a problem in any 4x game. This is where civs ganging up on a more powerful one, etc usually come into play. This again applies to the ai since you point out that you are the run away civ. I highly doubt they are currently willing to really gang up on you, they also are dumb as a brick right now. I think I mentioned that before, but just incase you somehow still don't get that part.

Colony rush should not be the only viable strategy. I personally don't like colony rush because I find it unrealistic. a colony ship pumped out every 3-5 turns and new planets become as productive (or even more depending on luck) as the homeworld very soon..

Making new colonies should require an effort and should take time and even more effort to make them really productive. That's how i1d imagine extraterrestial colonisation. So no Gaia/paradise worlds. They could become one after terraforming. New worlds should have very low pop limit/pop growth before at least basic terraforming. I like the way it was in moo2. Ok there were teran/gaia planets, but those usually were guarded by space monsters, however most of the other planets were colonizable just not so great to feel you must grab them or you are gona lose.

In the most simple 4x model the growth is exponential: if you are bigger you do everything better, it's only time when you are gona win. Luck pléays too big part and usually there is only one strategy: expand. that1s why there are mechanism in games to counter this and give more options. Civ4 had great features for this (maintenance, special civics for wide/tall empires, national wonders etc. There were similar features in galciv2, but i feel colony rush was still the only good strategy there.

I take it from reading here that in Galciv 3 the costs for new colonies is a lot less than it was for Galciv 2 where the name of the game was going green (money).

There were a few things put in place in Galxciv 2 to slow the colony rush, extreme environments, life support limiting the distance from your space,  and of course fear of having a lone colony far away where it could be flipped if surrounded. And lets not forget the income lost on colonists in space. lowering your population slowed growth rate.

Are these not in the new game?

I don't want to see penalties like Civ5 has. 

1.  Not in Beta yet (as of Beta 3).  That's one of the major "TO DO" features still in the queue.

2.  In GC3.  But this by itself does not change the fact that growth is an arch-strategy.

3.  In GC3.  But flipping uses the Influence clock, which increases monotonically and is independent of pop.  So the simplest way to win a flip-duel is to build your Consulate first.  Which actually rewards expansion (to some extent).  Maybe a tortoise empire that arrives with 3.0 bp and enough bc to rush-buy a Consulate will actually outrace the rabbit empire that got there first with 0.2 bp and flat broke ... but we can't really test that because multi-player and AI are both just placeholders for now.

4.  This is countered somewhat by sending out your colony ships nigh-empty, with minimum 0.5 bp (or less than that if it's all the planet had).  So you don't lose much.  Also, since growth rates are flat (independent of current pop), you maximize empire-wide growth by maximizing growers.  10 planets with 0.5 each will grow 10 times faster than 1 planet with 5.0, because they all grow at the same flat rate.

Basically, colonization now is K-strategist (many unguarded eggs scattered like pollen).  We'd like to at least reward R-strategists (investing in a few well-developed young, who are utterly helpless for their first 24 years), without introducing Yet More Micro.  Maybe add umbilical trade routes to your own colonies, which boost their early growth?

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Proposal:   A colony has the ability to set up a support line to a new colony.   Drains X bc per turn from parent.   Options could supply whether planet of origin automatically does this or not.   With this support a colony grows roughly normally (maybe a bit faster, would have to be balanced of course).

A colony without support, or which has its support cut by pirates or enemy action, grows very slowly.

Once a colony reaches a certain size or wherewithal, the support line and cost disappears.   Or it could gradually be removed as the planet grows.

Point is to increase the maintenance of young colonies.

I agree, it's an idea.

I like the idea of colony support I would also like to be able to add support from other colonies. I think having something like having the city screen in civilization would work better at tackling this than the colony screen in galactic civilization. I,m sure a lot of people would like to thank you for the spa act on the galactic council. This is probably what inspired it. Think galactic civilization ultimate handled this well. I just would like to see an air that can handle this. You are actually a minority on this. Most people like the colony grab.

I HATED Endless Space because of the expansion happiness penalty, its arbitrary and makes no sense.  People are leaving your overcrowded homeworld, and you're upset about it.....  Huh?

About the only control on expansion rate I would agree with is a small increase to maintenance costs and maybe increase the cost of those super cheap colonizers people were talking about.  I don't think the colonizers I've used where too cheap but I tend to stick with the default colonizer because I seem to get really bad starting positions most of the time.

Don't forget. GC3 is still in BETA. GC2 did the same thing in its beta until the last couple of builds when they did all of the balancing.

Have to agree here, kind of tired of size trumps all. It is especially noticeable in GC3.  With everything from production to research to wealth to influence tied into pop size it really does feel like a rat race to colonize as much as possible.

And if I end up with twice as many colonies you will lose. Twice as many colonies means twice as much pop more often than not, which leads to being able to equal your max research and still out produce you easily. This in turn leads to arms (tech) race parity and since not only am I equaling your tech level but producing a war machine that is larger than you can produce.  Kiss you ass good bye.

I get how people who like to expand like locusts would hate any "Artificial" limitations. But without some kind of limiting mechanism there becomes only one viable strategy regardless of what ever they add such as extreme worlds.

To be fair even in Civ 5 or any other game I have yet come across a strategy that would allow a tall turtle empire to beat a wide empire given players of equal skill. But no game yet has really mastered the real life issue of bureaucratic overhead. And the loss of nimbleness and reaction time larger organizations have versus smaller more agile ones.

The only way I can see simulating such a beast is having a turn delay on executions of orders be they production or military movement the farther from the central command one got.

I.E. the farther ships were from your capitol the longer the delay between when you could mobilize them. Or the further from your capitol the longer the delay between when you told your planet to shift from economic to military expenditures.

Think of it like this.  You have a captain in charge of a border fleet and a admiral in charge of the war over all on your capitol.  There is a huge fleet heading for your home world and a smaller fleet headed for your border world. 

The captain seeing the small fleet would want to sally forth to confront it immediately or have to relay a orders request back to the home world. But the captain is unaware of the huge fleet headed for the home world and the fact he is needed to reinforce the core.  If he goes after the small fleet he is out of position to reinforce, but if he waits for orders then the small fleet gets to rampage with impunity while the captain waits for commands.

Unfortunately this kind of fog of war is all but impossible to replicate in a game like this and as such limiting mechanics are the rule of the day.

Implementing a time delay, which reflects the reality that communication as well as travel ought to be slow in space, is a puzzlement.   But it is an idea with such merit it deserves some effort to find a way.

I remember a LONG time ago there was a tabletop game in which travel by warp was initiated, and the ship(s) then could not be given orders until they appeared at the target destination X turns later.   This created considerable tension in the game, to be sure.  It's not the the same thing by any means, but it is an idea in the same genre perhaps.

A game where central command gives a fleet a mission and then has an increasingly delayed communication for updates sounds cumbersome unless there are very few fleets involved.  But then I haven't thought about it a lot.   There would also have to be some leeway for fleets to use initiative (which might indeed be a function of the particular AI's culture).   But that makes it even more complicated.

Thinking about land based games I am aware of some efforts at implementing imperfect command and control (strongly related to the current issue).   Mostly it seems to me that it was just that some units under stress don't execute their orders as reliably.  Or don't respond at all.    I haven't seen it done well.

Another case of the balance between realism and play-ability, methinks.

There are a few things slowing down the expansion of players, population, manufacturing and money.  Currently population growth isn't that big a limiter for most empires, it could be an issue with the Iridium and possibly the Yor depending on how Paul has changed their growth mechanic.  Manufacturing is again not a bit limiting factor most of the time either especially as I get the impression that most players divert effort toward manufacturing early game.  The last is money and again currently isn't much of a limiter.  However none of that has been balanced yet, I expect upkeep costs will increase at least a little bit growth improvements and bonuses may be pushed back in the tech tree but I doubt manufacturing is going to be nerfed, you need that for everything.

I agree that not everything should be based on population, specifically I think that manufacturing should not be based on population at all.  Research, economy and influence definitely should be but again that hasn't been balanced either and those numbers will likely change.  I suggested back in September that manufacturing should be mainly automated and not dependent on population but many people jumped in and said that was game breaking and I don't think the devs considered the idea.  Specifically I want to turn Mars into an automated factory world while I turn Earth into a research, economy and food producer.  I also think that food and morale should be global or regional resources as well, within limits having all of your food production on Earth while you have 10 colonies is ridiculous but something like food being regional resource like planet X can produce food for all planets within 10 or 12 hexes could work and the same with morale resources and that could start smaller and grow with engine technology.

Delays in implementing orders doesn't really fit in GalCiv, each turn is a week so there is time to get orders cut.