The concept:

Koyasil begins the game with a colonization seed. The seed acts as a marker than can be placed on an explored system to direct the vine system to grow towards it. This procedure will absorb half the food and industry output of the seed's homesystem, with the cost scaling with how many "nodes" apart the source and the target is.


Additional seeds are nurtured on Koyasil automatically over a number of turns and with no further resource cost, and seeds can always be moved around like traveling ships.


The intent: 

-Maintain the danger of losing the growth progress by factions and pirates alike but make it a lot less punishing in the early game

-Increase the expansion speed in the early game, but limit it later on to prevent the prenerf Unfallen situation.

-Reduce the impact of game speed on the viability and fragility of the entwine mechanic.


The specifics:

Basics: The seed appears as an interactable object above a system's name, and can be drag and droped to an adjacent system(on the vine grid, not hyperlane one). After the vines complete encircling the system, the seed begins to take root over a period of 3 turns, during which the vine attempt is vulnerable. Once colonised, the system will become the seed's new homesystem, and can then be redirected to a new colony. Meanwhile Koyasil begins nurturing a new seed, that naturally matures after a number of turns, allowing more colonizations procedures to happen at once, up to a maximum of 5. 


Movement: At any time a seed can be directed to more to a different system at no cost, but with a travel time as if it was a ship with 2 of the best engine modules available to the faction.


Cancellation: While the seed is directing vines, it can be cancelled at will by the player, or by enemy ships sieging (guarding) the system once the roots have made initial purchase. I am not suggesting to completely remove the ability to distrupt the vine growth, but reduce the opportunity window of such, to the last few turns of the procedure. In either case the vine attempt is completely reset like in live. 


Optional: At later tech tiers of the game, the seeds grant X/Y/Z% bonuses to their assigned systems based on the system's developement level, if not currently directing vine colonization. 


The values of half, 3, 5, 2, X/Y/Z% are placeholders that need careful tuning.





My perception of the "issue" and why i suggest this rework:

Entwining takes 20 turns by a single ship. Additional ships cost 400 at the beginning of the game, but scale in cost (after the first entwining began the cost jumped to 600 for a bare chassis, but i am not savy of the precise math on the scaling.) 


Furthermore the need to protect the vine ship from enemies necessitates a lot of resource investmen in the early game , stumping system developement in general. The extra population from dodging the outpot food tax is nowhere near enough to match the base colony outputs. Overall unfallen expansion is way slower until it can reach a point where one can both own vineship fleets and the necessary protection, with that point coming very very late from a power curve prespective.


The difference is simply not something to recover from.


I am aware of the tactic that destroyes the first pirate fleet and base by turn 13-15, but this is merely the least resource and time consuming method, and rng with pirate spawns, or enemy faction actions can even distrupt this tactic.