Solution to early land grab be-all-and-end-all

I REALLY like this idea. Right now it seems like nothing can possibly compete with the priority of fast colony ships and constructors for the first 6 months or so. In real life, I think I'd have a hell of a hard time convincing 500 million of my closest friends to pile onto a ship and head off God knows where hoping that they find a habitable planet before they run out of supplies. I'd much prefer to be able to afford to explore with something other than colony ships.

I know the colony rush can be a bit predictable and nerve-wracking, but I don't think this would fix what you're trying to fix. It will be the same game dynamic, just adding a rush down the logistics tree as part of the initial colony rush. You wouldn't be able to research anything else, without losing a territorial/economy advantage later in the game. None of the AI's would want to trade anything else but logistics tech in the initial rush. It would eliminate a lot of the fun in researching and horse-trading different tech lines in the early game.

It's possible to slow down the rush a little by using the larger map sizes, uncommon habitable planets, and tight clusters. That makes it a little harder to "colony hop" and automatically extend your ships' range. You might be forced to stop and research (or trade for) better life support and sensor range to reach the more distant prizes. And the AI civs will have the same handicap on those maps.

@Citizen Poole -- I don't like sending colony ships out blind either, mainly because I hate it when they "dead end" and I end up not being able to use them. What I do is purchase fast (custom) sensor ships, in-between every colony ship purchase, until I run out of money. Then I build alternating sensor and colony ships. That gives me several sensor ships to explore with, and the sensor picture of the neighborhood doesn't disappear as each colony is settled (which is what happens if you only use colony ships in the initial rush). You'll have a better chance of stumbling on another civ for trade, also. After the initial rush, I park the sensor ships on the borderline as static sentries, to keep an eye on things. It costs me roughly one colony ship to build those sensor ships in the initial rush, but I'm more efficient in where I send the colony ships, and I make trade contacts faster.

I've been playing with rare, rare, rare and tight cluster settings; with so few planets each one is strategic. There's still the mad rush to find the habitable ones but I think it makes for a more interesting game than having a planet every other sector. Stations become more important too serving as border patrol stations.

Actually, GalCiv, thanks to its emphesis on starbases, can almost work out OK without the land-grab phase of the game.

The reason is that starbases make cities better. And if you focus on them, it makes them betterer. The reasons why this isn't enough are 2-fold:

1: You need tech to get them and to get upgrades (and tech to get more of them). The guy with more raw land will get tech faster than you.

2: The guy with more land can also exploit starbases.

At the same time, I think GalCiv deals with this better than most strategy games, because it ultimately forces a perfectionist strategy. A game of Civlization can be won just by building dozens of cities. But unless you're playing on a planet-rich, large galaxy, you're going to run out of room fairly soon. This forces you to go for improving what you've got better than the other guy.

Not only would each colony placement become more important lending a greater depth to colonisation, but this would make sense thematically as well - if logistics needs to be researched to shove a few ships together, surely it would be needed to co-ordinate a galaxy wide federation of planets, no?

Do that, and all you do is make everyone research logistics as a massive priority. Particularly on a galaxy with lots of planets.

Something the game Alpha Centauri did that was kind of nice was an "accelerated start". You pick that option, and everybody starts with empires that are similar in power and have about 50-100 turns of development. It was a way to skip the mad expansion rush and get on with the empire management and warfare. It also ensured that everyone had similar power at first (no one AI or player gobbling up the whole map and ending the game before it even started).

Of course, I have no idea how much work that feature would take to add. There's probably also some issues involving the fact that the different AIs are designed to emphasize expansion to a different degree, but to be honest I'd be willing to sacrifice that diversity from time to time to be able to take a break from the the "ZOMG BUILD COLONIES!!!1" phase of the game.

Personally I think getting resources is as if not more important than getting too many planets.

Not only would each colony placement become more important lending a greater depth to colonisation, but this would make sense thematically as well - if logistics needs to be researched to shove a few ships together, surely it would be needed to co-ordinate a galaxy wide federation of planets, no?

Actually, I think it'd make sense to do something like this. You could also tie in the Governmental upgrades (Republic, etc) to increase your colony or total system limit.

And I'd think Logistics wouldn't necessarily be the main priority - sure, research that to get more colonies. Or go after research/production techs; which is better, small numbers of highly productive worlds, or many poor worlds? Could be a tossup; I haven't experimented with that idea.

One thing that might work to limit an early massive land grab, is to make new colonies have an initially high per-turn development cost that goes down over time (perhaps as population increases). I remember seeing something like this in the venerable Spaceward Ho! 4X game, and it worked pretty well to limit over-expansion; if you expanded too quickly, the development costs could overwhelm your capacity to afford them and your colonies start to die.

With some balancing to make sure that it isn't *too* expensive to expand reasonably, this could work well in GC2, I think. If the colony dev cost was a user-selectable game parameter, players could vary things from just as they are now (if cost=0) to requiring highly strategic and selective colony expansion (if cost=very high) even in large galaxies with abundant habitable worlds.

I have a few Questions about your ideas

In Citizen col80's idea:
What would happen when you invade a planet, after you have reached your planet limit?
In Citizen LintMan 's idea:
Wouldn't an empire with an economy bonus etc have an unfair advantage (able to afford/own more planets initally)?

I have played games that limit expansion, like Call to Power 2, and I prefer games like GalCiv 1 & 2

I like the idea of reducing the landrush thing.

How about doing it similar to the starbase system, where each consecutive starbase gets more expensive to build? It wouldn't have to be linear either, so that the first colonies are comaratively cheap, but then they get painfully expensive.
If you link that to the size of the galaxy maybe, you could add this as more of a strategic decision.

Chrestomanci, the same can be said about diplomacy or military bonuses. There should be more viable options to succeed in this game other than buffing-up the diplomacy or expanding like crazy. I support it, we need some alternatives. Let us succeed or at least hold our own even if we fail the colony-rush.

Thanks!

Something the game Alpha Centauri did that was kind of nice was an "accelerated start". You pick that option, and everybody starts with empires that are similar in power and have about 50-100 turns of development. It was a way to skip the mad expansion rush and get on with the empire management and warfare. It also ensured that everyone had similar power at first (no one AI or player gobbling up the whole map and ending the game before it even started). Of course, I have no idea how much work that feature would take to add. There's probably also some issues involving the fact that the different AIs are designed to emphasize expansion to a different degree, but to be honest I'd be willing to sacrifice that diversity from time to time to be able to take a break from the the "ZOMG BUILD COLONIES!!!1" phase of the game.

Yes this would be a nice option from tme to time

One thing that might work to limit an early massive land grab, is to make new colonies have an initially high per-turn development cost that goes down over time (perhaps as population increases). I remember seeing something like this in the venerable Spaceward Ho! 4X game, and it worked pretty well to limit over-expansion; if you expanded too quickly, the development costs could overwhelm your capacity to afford them and your colonies start to die.

Well, do you know that currently, colony cost something to maintain to prevent a too fast colony rush? During the beta its cost was higher but was tone down.

BTW, I am wondering if the problem doesn't lie in the important treasury you have at the start of the game. That allows some nice colony ship rushbuying as well as some pretty important deficit during the first stage of the game, while you are struggling to have a positive budget.

In any case, you can't avoid land grabbing: people means taxes and since the population growth is capped and since you want to control the population on a planet, an easy way to increase your income is to have more planets. Not to mention that it helps for research and military.

An idea to stop the landrush is no colonising of planets if your treasuryis negitive

There are many ways to stop it but each has its own problems, anyway I find it slightly fun
And as Avatar Frogboy [Stardock] said

"Personally I think getting resources is as if not more important than getting too many planets. "

I have lost to the AI [one on one] when i had grabbed most of the planets but few resources

BTW, I am wondering if the problem doesn't lie in the important treasury you have at the start of the game.

This certainly helps to make the rush strategy so appealing and easy to implement. I think my main beef isn't that rushing to colonise frantically is a viable strategy - after all we surely want as many possible ways to conquer the galaxy as possible: military, economic, diplomatic, and expansionistic deserves it's place also. My problem is that it's such a no-brainer to pump out colony ships as fast as possible. There should be a cost associated with such expansion. For instance if you want to win by having the best ships or the most influentital starbases you are forced to specialise your research and neglect other areas, but there is no associated sacrifice for rapid colonisation.

Tying it into logistics ability was a suggestion for achieving this, and to those who think this would simply lead to logistics tech bee-lines, why should it? Other strategies don't have this problem - if you specialise at logistics you will end up with plenty of real estate but no defenses, planetary improvements, etc. for it. As with everythign in GalCiv2 it is a question of finding the right balance between different approaches. I think rising colony costs ala Civ4 could also work in this regard as has bee mentioned by other posters.

I just returned from another game. This whole aggressive expansionist approach is tiring me. It doesn't matter if I'm winning or losing, I can't play this approach for more than 20 minutes at most. I conquer a planet - take a break. I'm losing and can't break through the planet's defenses, I take a break. I really don't like it that much....

I would rather prefer to evolve my owned planets, build everything and enjoy a nice game, but unless I pick that huge diplomacy boost at the beginning of the game, I'm toast. You just CAN'T win if you're not expanding or conniving yourself to victory, no way. Eventually you'll be a someone's dinner, no matter your defenses. We need the builder or lone researcher approach to stand a chance as well, don't you agree?

What would be the effect on the colony rush if colony ships were, say, 3x as expensive, in the range of 300-400bc? This would be done by increasing the cost of the colony module itself. That means it takes longer to produce the ships and each initial colony is going to put you more in the hole and take you longer to recoup your investment.

I like colonization as it is.

Colony rush doesn't decide the game. In my last game, as the Terrans, I was playing a large map, with 9 civs, all intelligent. I had 4 planets the entire game (Save when I finally got round to crushing the Drengin). I had about 6 research resources, and used them as best I could. All my planets were researc, as was my spending
Naturally, I became filthy rich, set everyone at war, allied with the Altarians, started to rush buy an army, took my might up 400 points in 20 turns, crushed the drengins.

Don't think colony's decide the game. If it hadn't been for those research bonuses, I would have been trashed. But I scraped an alliance victory through being a diplomat.

If it hadn't been for those research bonuses, I would have been trashed. But I scraped an alliance victory through being a diplomat

Exactly. But like you said, diplomacy is the only real alternative to colony-rush and aggressive expansion. You can't out-tech anyone due to tech-trading, you can't buy anyone even if you have huge amounts of money if you don't have enough diplomacy skill, and the best influence in the universe won't save you when the fleets are coming. Small defensive tightly-managed fortresses won't help you, either. So it's all down to either might or diplomacy.

I find out that if you change the begining setting of the gmes before it start you really can avoid an aggresive colonization strategy games dominated games.

Pick up rare common world, a not so big galaxy (small or tiny, but I prefer small) with few solar system and few planet by system. Also, make technology easy to research.

With this kind of setting, it is quite easy to survive with just one or two good to average planet.

But personnaly, I like colonisation. It would not be a 4x games without the colonisation/exploration scheme.

Fot those who find diplomacy and expansionnism is the only way to survive, you should try to play a trade heavy race. Get a lot of trade route and a good trade bonus and start trading like mad with the powerfull (at least one). If anyone attack you, theyll soon face your trading partner in the war, making you quite hard to kill. Chance are, your trade partner will become your ally and the alliance victory will become easy (who said you have to kill everybody yourself to win, just let your well financed allie do it themself). It a viable strategy (at least it was in galciv 1) and i`m sure it still is in galciv 2.

Gaudar

Fot those who find diplomacy and expansionnism is the only way to survive, you should try to play a trade heavy race. Get a lot of trade route and a good trade bonus and start trading like mad with the powerfull (at least one). If anyone attack you, theyll soon face your trading partner in the war, making you quite hard to kill. Chance are, your trade partner will become your ally and the alliance victory will become easy (who said you have to kill everybody yourself to win, just let your well financed allie do it themself). It a viable strategy (at least it was in galciv 1) and i`m sure it still is in galciv 2

Yeah, I did that, too. It didn't work. I was constantly stuck in the corner (for three straight games, weird), no one wanted to trade with me or take my bribes (I had a very good bonus to economics), and eventually, after the Arceans finished mopping everything, they went straight at me for no apparent reason. Bummer. Even my lucky-rangers backed up by a very potent military starbase didn't save me from their huge fleets. But thanks, I'll try it again, and restart until I'm in the center of the galaxy.

Err you want to be at an edge. You get more trade from further routes. Those freighters are slow (unless you upgrade them) But get enough of them across the galaxy to the high population planets and you can sleep in pools of money.

I personally snag every planet I can. I'll buy colony ships immediately to get one per turn and snag as many planets as possible. Then I worry about the finances later. Usually there will be enough taxes going to make up for it, so it works out.

I think there is something in the logistics idea perhaps as an option?.

The notion that it will just cause a rush down the logistics tree is not quite right as you will need to conduct related research, earn cash, develop pop, build science and research centres and boost economy to afford it.

What it would do is put another layer of planet development into expansion which seems realistic to me, and for fans of slow burners I am really intrigued about pushing my economisc and research hard to support my expansions, not just spending 20 turns running into debt maxing out military expenditure - as is the current phase one mantra.