The game does need some sort of REX inhibitor. The best ones (at least to me) are the ones that make new colonies run at a significant loss until they grow enough and a significant penalty at the imperial level based on the size of the empire. The current penalties based on empire size are just woefully inadequate.



Beefing up pirates so they can invade a weak system, can spawn anywhere (affected by approval?) and can destroy system improvements if left alone could also help but puts more micro on the player.

@Zeneticus: I'm sorry but you are completely besides the point.

REX is broken in ES as it is now. The map size doesn't matter, the race doesn't matter you will always end up getting the best results when you expand as fast as possible. Look at the reasons I give in my first post. In other 4X games you have to sacrifice something when you REX (because it will put you in a very very strong position later in the game because of all the cities/planets you have). In ES you don't sacrifice anything its the other way round you get more rewards the more land you grab. Having more diplomacy wont change that.



2nd: REX (Rapid Expansion) always happens in the early phases.. if its not in the early phases its just Expansion

I think one angle that I hope will be taken to deal with this is tweaking the different planet types so they're more distinct from each other. Right now the morale penalties and lower FIDS/Pop values for arid/tundra and onwards are pretty marginal compared to what you'll be extracting from them in about 10 or so turns. So marginal that it's almost a no brainer to just colonize everything as soon as you possibly can since you're very likely to be making more than enough dust/turn to make up for the -6 from the system wide food and industry improvements. If at the start of the game you could only really colonize terran/ocean/jungle worlds without sacrificing a significant amount of dust to support the colony that would help tone down the early game rush a bit. Increasing the negative morale penalties for planets would help too since right now it's pretty easy to offset the -5 or -10 from most planets just by keeping taxes below 50% until you've built morale improvements.



i'd also like to advocate for a shuffling around of colonization techs because i'm a giant nerd and can't deal with the idea that building houses on an exploding lava hellworld is easier than building a space station that orbits a gas giant (i know we're ostensibly landing guys on the core but that's crazy when you could just do not that) or is inside an asteroid :V

Or building houses on an exploding lava hell world being on the same level of difficulty as a barren world.



Make the thing air tight and with it's own gravity and you're pretty much done.



This is just nitpicking, though.

I don't know if it would stop rapid expansion, but having fuel limits (and tankers) like Sword of the Stars would help by virtue of requiring you to establish forward outposts to refuel your fleets at.



What I'd like to see more of is what I've seen mentioned a few times: needing to use your military to secure your empire from threats other than other empires. Pirates are awfully capable right now... Maybe drop their hull size down (rename the current Corvette the Frigate, and keep the pirate hull size named the Corvette) but keep their numbers the same so your military forces can crush them, but also make them do meaner things to systems they're blockading.



There should be some incentive to keeping military forces stationed towards the rear of the empire. Rebellious colonies (outposts are far more dependent on support, so maybe allow pirates to sack them rather than having them rebel) and home-grown piracy (an abstracted concept that costs you Dust production, increases exponentially with the amount of Dust produced and decreases exponentially with the nearby military force—faster ships allow you to project force farther and more effectively) are my two ideas. This help reduce rapid expansion by making there be more strategic purposes for military ships even without a nearby enemy.

First time poster here.



As a Sophon player, I found that Expansion combined with periods of developing planet infrastructure (along with a bit of luck with starting resources) to be essential in being able to stay in the game past turn 100. Teccing up to an appropriate point of expansion, basically.



I agree it can be too fast, at least the first few times I played where Cravers are usually knocking on my door by turn 40-50. In an ideal world, I'd have expansion dependent on the players' system development e.g When empire borders cover a planet.

Though, when the game speed is fast, I certainly expect the gameplay to be. Would it be more of a question of scale and there being that much more of it?

I've noticed that if I set the game speed to "Fast" it becomes possible to generate population "fast".



I usually choose "Low" resources, so that there is some strategic importance, and getting them is an issue. That makes it a bit more interesting for me to send colony ships to important systems, and backfill less valuable systems later.



Galactic Civilizations 2 was a major Rapid Expansion race. Nothing else mattered early game. Also, I think that was the case with Space Empires V. An early lead in worlds meant winning. Everything else was secondary.

I agree with you completely, expanding is too easy.

@AngleWyrm: Yes but that doesn't really matter. Resources are only the icing on the cake that is a new colony. Getting new colonies is to easy and the benefit they give you is to big (especially in early game) compared to nearly every other 4X game I played.

StK wrote:
- There is no real danger in expanding: Pirates can not really harm your colonies (Compare: Civ Barbarian will wipe a city if unprotected)

This is technically untrue, as I have on occasion had system I colonized invaded and then taken over by pirates when I slacked in building my military. And of course the system they took had the Titanium-70 I needed...



The rest I do agree with. I didn't realize it until I read this, but expanding does seem easier than it should probably be.

@FinalStrigon: Yes but: compared to other 4X games the danger for your colonies in early game is negligible. It will take the pirates (in the early game) several turns (I'm not sure.. I have to test that but I think about 7) to take over a colony. In Civ for example it takes 1 turn and the city is gone... (also that they would raze a city that has only one inhabitant so there is no hope of getting it back.. so all of the investment is lost forever)

For all the people that don't want to click the first link:

I think this is also a reason why the races seem so similar, because for every race the best strategy is to REX. So every game you play no matter the race will feel similar, because you will go for rapid expand.

(edit: sry for the doublepost.)

StK wrote:
@FinalStrigon: Yes but: compared to other 4X games the danger for your colonies in early game is negligible. It will take the pirates (in the early game) several turns (I'm not sure.. I have to test that but I think about 7) to take over a colony. In Civ for example it takes 1 turn and the city is gone... (also that they would raze a city that has only one inhabitant so there is no hope of getting it back.. so all of the investment is lost forever)

Heh, I must be dealing with super pirates, I lost my colony in three turns. But I get your point. I've never played any other 4X game, so I don't know what else to compare it to. I still agree, though, expansion is a bit too fast. I'm not sure what to suggest to do about it, though. If you slow it down too much, you might not be able to get resources that you need quickly, possibly hurting you in the long run.



I'd be hesitant to make Colony ships more expensive, as in the beginning (for me at least) they already take around 8-10 turns to put one out. Now, a new colony every 8-10 turns (plus time to travel) I don't think is so bad, but if you get lucky with your starting planets and can get a high production pretty quickly, you can just start to crank them out (your population permitting, of course). So...It's tricky, I think.

To be fair, in Civ V i think it is, the taking of cities is far more similar to this, you attack the city and it has a "defence bar" thing, that when it is reduced enough the city falls, you don't need units on the city to defen it, though it helps.

Heru wrote:
Civ V

They made a Civ V?

uhh.. xkcd-reference.. I love it.. (^^,)



@Hero: First of all: I think that is one of the many flaws of Civ V, but also Civ V has its methods to discourage too fast expansion (you need to connect your cities but you pay for the roads, you need workers, settlers are more expansive, the cost for the civics go up with every city and you have a really limited happyness pool when you start).

Again .. there is no other 4X game where expansion is so save and easy as it is in ES.

Draco18s wrote:
They made a Civ V?

Yep, and its better then Civ 4

I stated it >here<, but I think it should be its own thread and it should be in design:



I think eXpanding in ES is too quick and too easy.

Reasons:

- Colonyships are cheap and have no real downside (Compare: Civ cities don't grow when building a settler and start out with 1 pop instead of 3) (Yes it costs one but if you manage your starting colonies correctly this is no problem)

- The upkeep cost is negligible compared to the benefits

- There is no real danger in expanding: Pirates can not really harm your colonies (Compare: Civ Barbarian will wipe a city if unprotected)

- There is no limit for the distance your ships can travel (Compare: MoO 2)

- Colonyships are kinda save while traveling: They can't be engaged while en-route between stars only ships camping a star en-route can intercept them.

I only gave one example of games that have such mechanisms in place, but there are many more.



It seems REX (Rapid EXpansion) is the only way to play, no matter which race you play no matter any other setting.

I think we need a few more of these mechanisms so that there would be different playstyles then only REX.



Edit: Compare >the 30 turn challenges<.



Edit2: - In Civ there is also the need for a worker unit for your cities with slows Expansion even more (because again cities don't grow when you build one and (up to Civ IV) you should have as many workers as you have cities)



Edit3: Another point are these self upgrading planet exploits of ES. When you research a better production center for a planet every planet you have upgrades immediately and also the new planets do not have to build the old one before they can have the new one.. they can have the new one immediately at the same cost.

Colonial Industry base: Cost 40

Geo-Industrial plants: Cost 40

This makes new colonies a lot stronger then in other 4X games because there you would have to build both of them.



edit 4: all of these will make expansion more difficult and slower in the early game. But in the late game (especially on big maps) there comes a different problem: the Mali for having a big empire are getting to big those should be lowered.

(thx to KNC for pointing that out)

@Quirkimaru: I'm not really sure what you want to say, but I invite you to take a look at the 30 turn challenges ... and then try a proper REX strategy in your next game. It is so strong there is no real alternative to it.

I agree that there is a problem with how easy expansion is. I think simply allowing fights to be initiated while in transit between colonies would sort it out. If you had to build a few corvettes to accompany every colony ship you made, and even then having the chance that a pirate fleet could get lucky and blow your coloniser out of the air in battle, you'd be a lot less eager to do the REX strategy that works at the moment.