No, it wouldn't. The point of having the greater cost is that it slows them down for the moment. So you can (as an extreme example) match tech with them while they're busy investing in this weapon starbase. Yes, you'll have to go through the same slowdown if you go for that tech yourself. But you will have, for a time (before the bonuses from the new tech they're working on kick in), relative pairity with the other side.

Also, if both of you are slogging through these kinds of things, you're still closer together in terms of overall capability than otherwise. And when he gets to the next tier of slogs that are even slower, but more powerful, he'll be slowed down even more.

No need for arbitrary rules like "other people research stuff faster," and other such nonsense. People don't like negative mechanisms, but they also don't like getting something arbitrarily for less than other people. Unless there's some gameplay reason for it (tech trading, etc).

Now we have a Diplo argument going!!!

What next??? Space Cows???

I'd rather get the "Combo-Punch-Linear-Modulo" factored at the current trio than getting a fourth tier which would complexify things even further with almost no Strategic effects over combat probabilities. Bigger and Most isn't better in that case.

Lemme explain;

- Why should Beams aim at shields only, etc?

- Any combination of two or three "types" of weapons is modulated towards a Punch ratio at global defenses that match these types.

- Linear activity which makes it possible for lowest defending figures to compensate Attacking "leaks" IF no weapons are aboard.

- And so on...

AT THE SAME COST, A civ that controls 1/3rd of the galaxy would be able to get the needed resources for MUCH MUCH MUCH faster than a civ that controls only 1/8th of the galaxy. Thus the small civ falls behind more, and big civ still 'keeps getting richer'. Sure it would take a long time to kick in, but it would take even a longer time to kick in for the smaller civ's. That is pure runaway game, and nothing else.

And why in the world would a civ with only 5 planets need to pay so much? There's less infrastructure to change during their government upgrade. Whereas a civ with 98 planets has much more to do. Relative cost to size only makes sense.

I agree, they will probably call the 4th tier 'Subspace Weapons' and 'Subspace Inhibitors'.

That's a good idea, the mini-UP wouldn't use influence points to vote, and would deal with more of the everyday galactic going-on's. Weekly might be a bit too often. It would be more like everyone getting together Without the UP, to come up with solutions of their own.

You're not understanding the concept here.

Let's say we have two runners, A and B, running in a race. A runs at 10m/s. B runs at 5m/s.

After 1 second, A will be 5 meters in front of B.

Now, let's put a barrier in the way. 10 meters from the start of the race, we will force everyone to slow down by 50%.

A hits that barrier after 1 second, thus slowing down to 5m/s. So, after 2 seconds, A will be... still only 5 meters in front of B.

A lost an entire second's worth of progress.

Now, when B hits the barrier, he too slows down. After 3 seconds, A will be only 7.5 meters ahead; without the barrier, he could have been 15 meters ahead.

That's what I'm talking about. A is still ahead (this is important; you can't stop A from progressing faster relative to B, or else there's no incentive to improve), but he's not as far ahead as he could have been. Diminishing returns.

Arbitrary rubber-band rules like this are not appreciated by any player, even one who is losing.

Never try to tackle a problem like this directly. Game design must be subtle; if the player can easily tell how a rule is supposed to affect the game, it's probably a bad rule.

Although a relative gov size cost sounds like a good idea, it would be extrordinarily difficult to impliment while retainging my personal key factor: moddability. If gov costs were to increase with civ size, the gov techs would have to be seperated from the rest of the techs, which seems like a lot of work for a very simple problem.

Of course, Alf's cap is about as subtle as a brick, and there is no way to make it realistic in a game. Hence, my possible soultion: balanced govs. The governments should not be entirely better than the ones that come before them. Instaed, they should be suited to dieerent victory conditions, helping a player with that gove who decides to pursue the victory and becoming a hinderence if you change paths w/o switching govs. As you move up the gov tree, they would become more specialized, but not directly more powerful.

To make things harder for the guy who is ahead, simply give a slight bonus to everyone else, and have them gang up on you.

You can control the financial resorces and algorythms to a certain degree from the race customization screen, but is is fairly limited and you cannot apply it to the regular races. What I am talking about is a system that basically removes the upper limit to the game's difficulty.

OK, it seems like everyone likes oversimplifying my idea, so I will restate it again.

Buildings cost production. Techs cost research. Governments cost nothing. None of these things are available on the map. That is how things are now.

My suggestion is to make more advanced structures cost more than just one thing. Planet boosting starbases cost both production and some quantity of research. Advanced governments require placement on the map, which is something that can be attacked. Advanced techs can have a required starbase that must be produced before you are considered to fully possess that technology; destroying this starbase means you don't "have" the tech anymore, and thus can't research its required techs.

It slows the player down by forcing them to spend multiple kinds of resources on additional bonuses. It makes the player more vulnerable by forcing them to put some of these assets on the map, where they can be attacked (thus giving them more places to defend, which requires more defensive resources). And most importantly, these resources have to be spent sequentially, which means it takes longer to get the effects of them.

See? It's very organic and subtle. It is not a "research X tech and suddenly you lose 50% of your production."

I wouldn't know; I don't play on those kinds of maps.

Furthermore, I would point out that this is partially an interface problem. CivIV's revolutionary idea of allowing you to do the common tasks to a city from the main screen really changed how I played the game. I could look at a group of cities from the main map and know a good 80% of what I needed to know: what the city's making, when it will go up a level, is it in disorder, and how long the city will take to make it. I can even access the build queue directly without bringing up the city screen, by clicking on the production circle.

With a good interface, you can handle a lot of macro-management. GalCiv2's management could be much more refined. For example, selecting a planet could allow you to produce things directly from the main map. The location of a tile is irrelevant except for special bonuses, and it wouldn't be too difficult to come up with an interface for handling that. Just put a simplified version of the main screen in the lower-left corner, where you can click on a tile if you want to replace something. And so forth.

They could put what's being built by a city on the main map. They could put how long those things are going to take. And so on. Rather than making you look through a clunky list that has a squirly scrollbar that takes a button press to bring up, and has no relation to what's on the screen.

Lastly, this is not a fully-formed design; it's merely an idea. A fully-formed design would have a way of dealing with this without multiplicatively exploding the number of "cities" that a player has to manage. "Put things on the map, and use multiple resources to take advantage of more advanced abilities." This is a starting point, not an ending point.

What Alfonse is talking about is an increase in what I call "game layering": more connections between research, military, and social aspects of the game. This would not fix the "rich richer" problem: a player who is not well-established cannot afford to produce these stabases and other structures. A player who IS well-established would not have these problems. It may slow them down a little, but not enough to rectify the problem. My system makes the rest of the galaxy gang up and try to take down anyone who is a clear front-runner.

Take it a step further, and layer everything (well, not everything)... if your morale sucks, your production goes down (after all, depressed people won't do their job as well as 'smiling bob's'). I agree, there should be some kind of tie-in between economics and military/social production/research. Right now, they are all a bit too seperated for their own good. A planet with econ buildings and 12 billions people give infinitesimal amounts of help to research. So in other words, all 11.99 billion of those people are good spacecar salesman, but are science morons.

Perhaps building econ buildings, research stations, or factories increases the base amount of that particular production, but planets will still bring in a modest, fair amount of each. This only makes sense (to me at least).

So as population rises, so does research, economy, and factory production (even with nothing built on the planet). They would not increase by a large amount though, the social buildings would be for this reason.

No, your system rewards people for losing.

The fundamental paradox of the "Rich get Richer" problem is that you can't solve it. You're not allowed to. Because the moment that your competitors can get something for nothing, then the advantage of being the front-runner disappears, and no one has any reason to excel at anything.

Winning is hard; it takes effort. There needs to be a reward for it or people won't bother. My idea is to make sure that getting the reward from various advancement takes longer and longer. It's still there, there are simply diminishing returns applied to it.

Another method of solving this issue, which would stack pretty well with diminishing returns, is to make it so that the guy who's behind can do something to try to get ahead, but it introduces a flaw that can be exploited by others. If nobody does so, then the smaller guy gets by for free. I'm not exactly sure how to go about creating such a mechanic, but if you can do it, I think it would work. Especially if there were several ways to boost production, but with some significant consequence.

Though a problem might be balancing. If the big guy uses this, he may have introduced an inherient weakness, but he may be big enough to compensate for it.