The game punishes you for splitting a world's output therefore specialisation is the only correct course of action if you care about getting the most out of your worlds.  If you are going to split hairs over the meaning of the word 'forced' then by all means fill your boots, it sound like you have a great deal to fill them with.

It'd be damn hard, to make a game where specialising and not specialising your cities/colonies/whatevers are going to be equally efficient approaches.

It IS quite possible to minimize the difference, but all such attempts in all the 4x games I've seen to date are doing nothing short of devaluing the choices you make when managing your empire. Either it matters what you do with a colony or it doesn't. And it only matter when SOME choices are more efficient than the rest.

So if you go as far as equalising efficiency and forcing than EVERY 4x game FORCES you to play in whatever it's "optimal" way of playing is.

In reality it's only a question of how far you can deviate from the "perfect" path.

And like I said, a friend of mine plays this game without following "the way of one-way" and I'm yet to see him complain about not being able to play like he does.

P.S. Before blaming me for splitting hairs for words consider your own answers. Did YOU reply with anything that concerns the actual topic and not just meaning of words? Honestly, with that kind of attitude, go fill your own boots. I may sound rather aggressive, and come around as someone who's looking for a "word fight", but that's just how it looks on the outside. In reality, I'm not here for starting squabbles or "going personal". If that's all you've got to talk with me about you might as well stop right now, I'm not biting.

Not really, no. ICS was still better even in post-patch, pre-g&k vanilla; you just had to keep an eye on population. It was only really killed in Civ 5 when they implemented the research penalty for new cities. From release right up until BNW, 'tall' was always weaker,

While at the post-patch, pre-G&K stage they succeeded in making happiness act as a general 'population limit' which could be spread through however many cities, Global Happiness never managed to deal with the other advantages to 'wide' empires which 'Tall' ones couldn't match. Wide empires grow faster, and so can fill up any new happiness bonus faster. Wide empires  have more build queues, allowing them to do multiple things at once. Wide empires have a larger number of tiles per population point, making them more flexible. A larger % of a wide empire's population is covered by the free food from the city tile itself, so you're paying less support for the same amount of population. Population in multiple cities is inherently more valuable than population concentrated in one city, and was right up until they put in the research penalty.

It's pretty simple, really. You can use a mechanic to challenge expansion OR development, but you can't use the same mechanic to challenge both, because the strengths of the two approaches are different. One will be better at dealing with any given mechanic than the other, more or less automatically. Trying to balance one mechanic for both is therefore incredibly difficult, and also pretty much futile. And that's why, after half a million patches and 2 expansions, Firaxis gave up trying to balance it around one and added the research nerf. They finally just gave up on one-meter-to-rule-them-all and added another mechanic to limit expansion.

Which brings us to GC3. Presently, 'Tall' empires are behind on more or less everything. They have worse approval until LEP gets ridiculous, because they need larger populations and the approval equation involves DIVIDING planetary approval by population. If you colonize 2 planets and don't build any farms, then your total population will max at around 12 and approval will sit at around 50% without any buffs. On 1 world, it's down to 25%.

If you have 1 world, to reach 12 population you must:

a) waste a ton of production and multiple tiles  on farms

b ) still have to build the same number of happiness buildings as the other guy

c) take twice as long to reach the population cap, since he's growing at the same rate on two planets - or spend yet more production on a hospital

d) have half as many tiles to work with

e) have less free production from the colony capitals

f) have fewer build queues

g) Need to build factories to catch up with the additional production from the colony capital

h) have to pay maintenance to get the same resulting food, production and growth from the same population. 

You're basically screwed on every limiter. Maintenance doesn't effect width at all but it will punish you for every inch of height. Approval hammers your large populations much more aggressively than the additional penalties from LEP effect wide empires for the same population value. You're choosing to live without the free extra growth and production; you should be rewarded for that sacrifice rather than punished even harder for failing to expand. 

On top of which, let's just look at the penalties that the big empire is suffering, shall we? Assume he's got enough LEP to wipe out his colony base approval altogether (presently, that's 15 planets) and has somehow reached that total without gaining a single approval bonus from anything:

a)He'll suffer -25% growth. This does pretty much nothing. Since growth is generally around 0.2 (very rarely higher), 25% is a rounding error. Besides, he's gaining 1.5 pop per turn empire-wide, so he'll still produce a full planet's worth of new production every 4 turns. The %-based growth bonuses really achieve almost nothing when growth sits determinedly in the low 0. range.

b)He'll suffer -25% production. This might seem painful, but really isn't, since again he's receiving far more than that in free production from his many colony capitals. 

c)He'll get 25% less influence, but again he's receiving more than that free from all the colony capitals - and it's coming from a dense overlapping lattice of planets. 

d) And he'll have 75% less resistance, though I've never actually seen an invasion fail either way. Also, if the enemy can actually get a transport to an undefended planet when you have dozens more planets than him, you're actually just bad at this game.

That's it. That's his burden for 0% approval (and even then, only if he doesn't have Patriotic otherwise, he's on 50% and has no penalties at all). And the Tall empire is probably suffering that penalty anyway, since he needs to build up huge planetary populations if he wants to remain remotely competitive and then has to use lots of tiles for all the approval bonuses.  Plus, even if he's stuck to just his homeworld, he's still got some LEP himself, too, so his population aren't that happy either. Oh, and just to add insult to injury, given 50 turns the wide guy can STILL ramp up every single one of his worlds quickly and simultaneously to be a match to the best class-equiv world in the Tall empire. 

Basically, happiness should limit tall empires and prevent them from concentrating too much power on one build queue. Maintenance should limit wide empires and prevent them from getting lots and lots of build queues - not by imposing an artificial limit, but by making more and more of the planets hosting those build queues focus on cash production instead of industry.

This is easier to balance, since you can now alter one limit without affecting the other; it scales more effectively, since planet sizes aren't changed by the map size and maintenance can be made to grow per-colony; and it just plain makes more sense (Empires have bureaucracies which cost ever-increasing amounts of money to maintain, but aren't necessarily consumed by sadness - it's particularly grating in 'good' empires where you've been lovely to your population all game).

a blast from the past. First I agree that the previous game had better economics. Does anyone remember the economic wall complaint. I didn't mind the economic wall that they took out. It was a challenge to overcome. They removed it due to complaints. Firaxis doesn't like big maps and some players don't like them either. I understand but don't agree with the problem with the colony rush on smaller maps or rare planets. I like big maps with every thing abundant. Going back to the economic wall something needs to be implemented to give me a challenge to raise money. Now I think they tried to replace this with a approval penalty. I think common to abundant habital planets on big maps should not have a large empire penalty. The reason why is why do I have a lot habital planets no body can use. Now if I'm playing smaller maps or rare habital planets. Then I probably not building really big empires. The game always penalized you for having to big a population.

love adjancency bonuses. I thought was a great idea. Does anyone know what the gameplay option does. Still missing manual.

@naselus That was a very well thought out post with many great points. I hope the devs read it.

I'm going there. It's the only move, assuming you want to make money off of your game. 90% of players play on Small or Medium maps, 90% of players play on Beginner. So sure, if you want to make the game more difficult to play for those 90% you're going to lose revenue. Stardock's choice here is to cater to the lowest common denominator or not to be able to pay their staff. So, I'd say it's the best and only decision and far from the 'worst thing(s) you can do to a game.'

GalCiv like many other 4x games lack proper ways to restrain economic growth in any realistic way and rely too much in pure linear mechanics that only exaggerate the issue.

You could easily include a very expensive maintenance on the capital building to make new colonies a rather expensive affair in the beginning, but this only fix the issue to some degree as to the difference in a wide versus tall empire is concerned.

What are the real problems in a large empire and why is it that some nations on earth are more wealthy than others despite them having smaller population, land mass and access to resources?

The easy answer is that internal stability and state control are the most important factor in most cases. Even dictator states can be prosperous as long as they are stable and the state power are in total control with population being at least content, there also need to be a certain economical freedom or the population will not be able to contribute as effectively to the overall economy. Otherwise a totalitarian state need to rely on some very valuable resource that is controlled by the state.

How is this translated into a 4x game?

Well... a totalitarian state will need to be quite small and rich in resources to prosper since they will for the most part lack the will of the population to be creative and motivated. They also need to divert a disproportional amount of resources into keeping the state stable which is why it could not expand its border too much.

The more free a society is the more it will be able to function in a scattered and wide environment since local policy is governed locally while trade is more or less unregulated and security is provided in cooperation of individual governments. In a space empire that would be individual planetary governments.

Most games simply give players too much freedom to build planets/cities/provinces they way they want in a totalitarian style and still behave like they if they are a free democracy with all the limitation of such system to go completely unnoticed. If the developers would force players to choose between a complete totalitarian planned market economy with all the limitations that goes with it or a more free market society in which they have almost no control over its infrastructure and economy they would just complain the game is no fun... they can't control it enough to feel that they are in charge or it is efficient enough. This is in my opinion the major drawback in the design of 4x games and in the mentality of a major part of the player base. This also lead to very contrived and gamey mechanics which the AI can't cope with since a player can micromanage and min/max things in a way no AI can ever compete with. This and the system usually are very unrealistic and simplistic as a result.

In GalCiv the AI so far can't build their worlds in an efficient way and almost exclusively change economy settings on a global level and not on an individual planet level. This give a huge unfair advantage to any player that min/max even a fraction of their worlds since that is so much more effective. In my opinion the developers should chose to restrict planets to empire wide management with the option of specialize a certain percentage of their worlds which give some sort of bonus to that area. How this could be done would then depend on the form of the empire and the overall morale or approval rate of the empire or something. Some mechanic that make new colonies a huge drain on resources until they are sufficiently built up would also give some thought to expansion and also make new buildings much more useful as you upgrade them at a lower maintenance increase from just building new buildings.

In essence upgrading buildings might be more expensive from a production point of view but much cheaper from a maintenance point and certainly from the efficiency.

One example could be that the initial cost of a tier one building would be say 10 production and give you +10% bonus while with a maintenance cost of 2 credits per turn. The second tier would cost 50 production and give you +30% bonus while raising the cost to 3 credits per turn... and so on. Now you really need to figure what and how to really invest in the future of the development of a colony and do so in the long term, new colonies would also take some time to develop into really profitable entities.

Another improvement would be to not encourage the same building to be built next to each other but to at least two other buildings types instead... this way you encourage to build more diverse planets with some few types encouraging it such as factory capitals still giving bonuses to adjacent factories.

Although any mod of this nature would require a completely different AI.

IN any way shape and form the mechanics as they stand in GalCiv is very unbalanced between a min/max player approach and what the AI are actually even remotely capable of performing. It is actually more of a challenge of sinking to the AI level of managing your empire than rasing the difficulty and min/max the game, not to mention it consumes much less of your time doing so.

Should I as a player really have to actively NOT play my best in order to find the game fun and not more like an accountants contest?

since you like to use this word nonsense. Set preferred specialization for exceptions. Base this on type not specific buildings. Different races have different preferences. Are you low on money. What are your resources and bonuses set bonuses for this. How many spaces are together. How many clusters. If minimum buildings are set then specialize clusters based on preference. After class minus resources. If econ ok then build by class else preference. Computers work well with if else statements.

I'll add another downside to Tall, on that note: at a certain point, an awesome world can massively out-produce the capacity for one shipyard to pump out even the largest ships. It's possible to work around this by alternating shipyard sponsorship during a turn, but that's not really intended. Wide empires have a much easier time fielding fleets with more diverse ship types (want a medium ship with a bunch of fleet support modules for 400 production? OK, 2 turns at secondary planet, or carry over 800 excess production from your capital).