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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.