Trade and its impact
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Holy cow is trade hard to balance. 
In our design we knew this would come up but we've played around with its implementation over the course of the previous months.
Where it gets really tough is you don't want trade to completely dominate the game but you want it important enough that people won't just leave the United Planets.
The United Planets is a council where the civilizations vote on different issues. You don't have to belong to it but if you don't, you don't get to trade. So it puts some teeth into going along with the UP mandates without the question "why the heck would I belong to this?" coming up (too much anyway).
The first thing we've changed is that you can only have 10 active trade routes. This may seem restricting until you envision an unlimited system where the AI players, never tired of building, simply overwhelm the galaxy. The next reason to limit it to 10 is for game balancing, if you know 10 is the max, you can design the game with certain variables in place. And lastly, because trade routes now have a tiny freighter ship that travels back and forth, the CPU time required to handle more ships would be problematic (as is, you could have 60 mini-freighters flying around).
In our design we knew this would come up but we've played around with its implementation over the course of the previous months.Where it gets really tough is you don't want trade to completely dominate the game but you want it important enough that people won't just leave the United Planets.
The United Planets is a council where the civilizations vote on different issues. You don't have to belong to it but if you don't, you don't get to trade. So it puts some teeth into going along with the UP mandates without the question "why the heck would I belong to this?" coming up (too much anyway).
The first thing we've changed is that you can only have 10 active trade routes. This may seem restricting until you envision an unlimited system where the AI players, never tired of building, simply overwhelm the galaxy. The next reason to limit it to 10 is for game balancing, if you know 10 is the max, you can design the game with certain variables in place. And lastly, because trade routes now have a tiny freighter ship that travels back and forth, the CPU time required to handle more ships would be problematic (as is, you could have 60 mini-freighters flying around).