I've worked up a quick mod (ExpansionismLimiter.zip) that starts to address the problem of hyper-expansion being the best strategy for all races. It works on the principle that colonizing should be a major effort, especially on difficult worlds, so those worlds should be rather unproductive for a while. To simulate the time needed to build infrastructure and generally make things liveable, each colony starts out with ownership as though it had just been conquered. This reduces happiness to 0, resulting in most production being near 0 as well. This will also affect the empire-wide happiness, making it difficult to maintain both a fast-expanding empire and a fervent one.



Colonies on planets without food production (class 4-5) will be particularly hard hit until you can buy an exploitation, quite possibly being stuck a single industry until their ownership improves enough to build the a food exploitation to grow (food production is often negative for these). However, there is no penalty for expanding into a new planet in an established system



As time goes by, the new colonies cease to be a drain on empire happiness, and start their own production. But, an empire that focused on building their home system up instead of expanding should.



In my limited testing, the AI appears to cope with this change without difficulty.



However, this mod does increase the desirability of the already sought-after administrator hero, as the flat bonus to food and industry (while still modified by ownership) become even more pronounced in their disparity, especially being combined on the same hero.



I would appreciate more expansive testing, as a possible suggestion for a permanent change to the game.

Oh my god, thank you. This is PERFECT for me.



I like to play a slow, sloooow game, turtling down, exploiting what I have, getting research power to the max, and then move on. Think of Space Empires 5 with all the production times at slowest setting. But when I play Endless Space, I move out to find that I've got a constellation, perhaps two, fully under my control, and find someone else controls about 50% of the map! Usually with only one or two planets per system, but still, his flags are everywhere.



So this is perfect. Now I just need to merge it with Tiax's planet expansion and anomaly overhaul mod. Shouldn't be too hard, only one text file in common, a text diff should let me sort it.

Thank you! I like to play small galaxies with poor resources – when yeach star and each ship make sense all throught the game... and game do not take so much time. Limit expansionsm it is a great idea to make game better with this settings and still not so long.

Godmark2 wrote:


However, this mod does increase the desirability of the already sought-after administrator hero, as the flat bonus to food and industry (while still modified by ownership) become even more pronounced in their disparity, especially being combined on the same hero.

For the mod I'm going to make, I'll make a change to the admin-hero anyways. I could do that first and then upload it here so you could include it in your mod.

what i did is just higher the expansion disapproval, and add extra lower disapprovl fuction on some later technology