Ok folks, I may be creating a monster flame-fest here, but it's a discussion the family needs to have...

Build Tall or Build Wide??

There's been a lot of talk about giving players the ability and choice to either build tall, or build wide.  This has been a claimed design goal through since before the days of GC4.  But this has generally amounted to just talk.  No matter the systems implemented it has pretty much always been hands down advantageous to build infinity colonies instead of a single Sigil like homeworld.

Correct me if I'm wrong on this, but it seems to me that the above point is in broad agreement.

My take on the matter is that there hasn't been a solution to this simply because there is really just no drawback or tradeoff to colonizing planets, nor building Core Worlds.  You spend some resources and over time those resources grow at a compounding rate through the whole game with no drawbacks.  Indeed, worlds and it could be said, Core Worlds - are the fundamental economic building blocks of the game.  Everything important in the game derives from colony production, with few exceptions.  Building out colonies is just fundamentally a overwelmingly dominant strategy.

This is also the case in virtually every 4x game ever created, so it's not an issue specific to this franchise.  Obviously one can make the quite appropriate argument that this is how 4x games are supposed to work.  You're supposed to build colonies/cities/castles/whatever, bulk them up, and run over your opponents with them.  And this is a fine argument, but on the other hand the long-standing talk of Tall vs Wide hints at a problem with this argument: primarily that it would be more fun to have a choice in the matter, instead of simply being pigeon-holed into a colony rush strategy every single game. 

So...  What can be done about this?  Recent efforts to scale back the colony rush phase of GC have done a pretty good job of reducing the frenetic stress of the early-game rush.  But the rush still exists, it's just been slowed/tempered.  Some of the ideology/etc abilities have done a decent job of including tall vs wide choices, but fundamentally building an infinite number of colonies is just too dominant a strategy.

Solutions:

I'm not going to propose a "solution" because this is a immense and complicated issue that does not have an easy answer.  However, might I propose a theoretical framework from which to address the issue?  Infinite Colony Spam is not an issue in real life, but it is for video games, why?  The answer is that building colonies (or Cities/infrastructure in real life) requires resources and energy to both produce and run.  In real life these resource constraints underlie our entire socioeconomic structure, but in video games these constraints are generally abstracted to the point of being basically free.  There may be a 'guns or butter' decision to be made, but it's never colonies vs something else it's always a choice of what to produce with those colonies. 

One way to introduce this choice and high level decision making into GC4 is to make colonies (probably just Core Worlds) require resources to both build and run.  The resource base in GC4 is the Durantium/Promethium/etc + some other esoteric resources (Snugglers/Techapod/etc).  So a logical place to start would be for Core Worlds to need to consume some of these resources in order to not suck.  Maybe the peculiarities of each planet dictate the types of resources they need per turn to operate efficiently.  Precursor worlds might require none, because that precursor tech was so damn good.  But those other planets - daaaamn, you really want that sweet Class 33, but damn, 0.2 prometheon, 0.1 techapod, and 0.1 hypersilicates per turn for it to not get output penalties... hmmm.

The choice comes in because players need these resources for other things, especially later in the game.  If your colonies are going to eat all of your Durantium, well then you know that you're sacrificing fleet strength later down the line.  So you can build planets, or you can build fleets, but it's difficult to build both.  This makes sense, because the resources underlying building a high tech society would probably be similar to those that go into make starships. 

So one workaround is just to skip Core World spam and just build tall.  You have plenty of resources (your homeworld obviously wouldn't require any resources since this is where you're from) and can focus on other things.  Like building fleets to resource starve your enemies that did build Core Worlds..

One change I would make to allow this, would be to allow mining starbases to also mine planets.  They could get something like 1/2 the resource output of those planets (the food/wealth/etc) as well as whatever special resources they might have (snugglers/etc).  So if you wanted to build tall you can still feed your one core world, and do it efficiently.

I have some other ideas too that've crossed my mind that aren't coming to me at the moment, and I have to get going here to run an errand, but I just wanted to start this discussion and get an actual tall vs wide choice into GC4, as having these decisions would be REALLY fun.  Most of the proposals heretofore haven't been bad, but they don't really address the underlying issue (colonies produce free resources) in a way that seems entirely satisfying, or aren't sort of immersion-breakingly cheesy, like just giving insane bonuses to a single core world for no reason at all.

Thanks for reading & Please discuss!!!!

I would be very interested in people's thoughts on the matter,

cheers,

-tid242