Are there any considerations for Galciv3 to support playing tall vs wide?
What is tall/wide you ask?
Tall is playing with fewer planets, focusing resources on improving 3-4 planets with tight focuses (This planet for tech, this planet for production, this planet for wealth, this planet for influence/culture.
Playing wide involves colonizing any planet of atleast value 1, every planet adds at least a little more production, wealth, influence, and research. Eventually you start conquering and integrating other races worlds until you are the largest race on every metric due to sheer number of worlds.
Playing tall might appeal to players that want to eschew indiscriminate colonizing of worlds. They want to manage only the nicest planets only build a few colony ships before focusing on research/infrastructure/war. The prefer to focus these worlds on expensive projects and wonders. Playing tall also requires significantly reduced micromanagement and planning but requires adding starbases to improve worlds whose tiles are all full.
Generally though you need to colonize everything or else have the dregin move in next door to that worthless 4 tile planet. The only way to exterminate without colonizing is to build terror stars which is very late game in my experience.
What I would like is a bonus to having giant populations on a single planet. Something that is difficult to achieve with an expansive empire that might have trouble maintaining order across so many populous worlds with different cultures. While separate planets in a civilisation might struggle to maintain a unified culture, a planet that is literally a giant city would have much easier time.
Another feature might include scorched earth, making planets you don't want uninhabitable to your enemies. Similar to Spore ships turning enemy worlds toxic, but with unclaimed worlds or worlds under your control. Perhaps evacuating wildlife and population to your core worlds so as not to only have the option to be evil. Take an enemy planet and add its people to a core world.
Research structures give bonuses to being closer to other research facilities on a planet, probably due to the easy ability to share resources and information. But if your research facilities and scientist population were spread across the galaxy this might slow research by slowing communication and as a result duplicating research as represented by a small research penalty per planet (e.g. 1-5%). Later on you can have an instantaneous communication technology reduce this penalty or eliminate it. That way it doesn't cripple wide/expansive empires late game but it gives small/tall civilizations an edge to stay viable against an ever expanding enemy.
This was just some thoughts I had. I didn't format it because I'm on the phone but if anyone is interestes I will see if I can't expand and clarify the post later.
