FreeOrion

Hello. Civilization 4 (especially BTS expansion), is a great leap forward compared to earlier civ games for many reasons. One of them is that it clearly defines the balance between horizontal (more cities) and vertical (better cities) growth. Horizontal growth is limited by maintenance costs that grow rapidly with the number of cities. Vertical growth is limited by happiness, health (pollution), special resources that must be obtained by settling nearby, special tiles that are limited and give great production for the first few citizen... Also technology expands the limit of your growth, both horizontal and vertical. This allows for more interesting decisions and also makes one city challenge extremely hard. Yes, limited number of national wonder slots and need to always build at least some military units forces you to specialize instead of building every building everywhere. And please note, that the cost of settlers is relatively low.

How does free orion limit horizontal and vertical growth and forces the players to decide?

Right now, the main limits to growth are the cost and time to build colony ships, and the speed at which newly colonized planets grow in population enough to produce useful amounts of resources.

Building a FreeOrion colony ship presently generates a unit of population from nothing, rather than taking population from the empire or planet, so could be susceptible to Civ1 and Civ2 style abuse where it was more efficient to build lots of underdeveloped cities than to build fewer larger cities, although there's not really an equivalent to the free city centre resoruce (meaning how in some Civ games population 1 cities generate 2 squares of resource per population unit, and additional growth just reduce this ratio).

I'd like to have a system where the player needs to spend trade / influence / social control / money to keep the empire happy, or at least doing what the player wants. The costs for this would increase with empire size, and would probably be shared with espionage and manipulation of other empires' populations (the same way you'd manipulate your own).

And I would also like to add strategic resources to FreeOrion, given the various important strategic roles they can have.

Much of this isn't scheduled until later design versions, though.

I hope that there will be limiters to colony spamming too, maybe colonys at beginning should be resource drain instead of benefit? And colonys more starlanes away from capitol could require more upkeep or would produce less like in sins. And this expansion limiter could be modified by racial picks to make races more distinct.

When we get round to migration that could easily provide a limit. New colonies won't do anything until enough population moves to them from the old ones.

You mean like Efficiency in Alpha Centauri, except in reverse (i.e., raising upkeep instead of reducing income)? That might work.



Interesting idea. The one potential flaw is that if the minimum population of a colony is P and your empire's total population is N*P, where N is the number of colonies that you have, then you are in trouble if you can't control migration, as you might wind up with none of your colonies functioning.

Of course, that may well be the point.

The difference between non linear increase in the upkeep and in some (possibly severe) productivity reduction is that colony even with productivity reduction is better than nothing. In case of upkeep it is possible to have negative gross effect of one more colony. In Civ4 if you expand too fast your upkeep exceeds your income, your empire goes to strike and you die. If you try one city challenge you have specialization problems, limited access to the resources, happiness and healthiness caps on population...

In freeorion in terms of specialization we already have focuses and if you switch it you need time to regrow the meters, with add colony leaders added later it will further increase the need to specialize. I'll post some ideas on possible realization of and with some brainstorming it may become useful later.

More Cv4 idea-lifting. I'd like to see some espionage/combat integration. I want to see empires spending espionage points and at certain espinage spending levels able to see the enemy fleet statistics so that if you have knowledge you have the power to adapt.

I think there should be a good balance between vertical and horizontal growth.

Astro Empires example
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With the issue about spamming colonies, Astro Empires ( http://www.astroempires.com ) has a simple yet effective means of limiting colony expansion.
You build colony ships for 100 credits. When a colony sets up the first base, you have to pay 50 credits (upon landing colony/setup base). Next base is double last, so 100 for 2nd base. 200 for 3rd base, etc.

This game is real time, so building your first research lab might take 10mins and cost 1 credit, 2nd level research lab will cost 5 credits and take 20mins, etc. So the idea is to spread fast early on, cause you can get a bigger economy by leveling up your buildings on multiple bases, then doing it on one base. But by about the 5th base it is harder to make a sixth base when it costs 800, so you need to do some vertical growth in between.

Population growth rate
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Along with the idea of colony ships taking population and putting them on another planet, population could grow faster if there is more population on that planet.
Eg a 5000 pop world gets 1000 this turn
a 2000 pop world gets 200 this turn

As mentioned before, currently

Vertical limit = Max populations (and slower growth as you approach them)

Horizontal limit = not much.. to some degree the fact that a new colony starts producing 0 (even with 1 pop, they have 0 Resource+Construction meters).. the Production cost of the colony ship. And the limit of profitably colonizable worlds early on.

I do agree that a horizontal limit based on 'money' spent to keep people from being rebellious, traitorous, saboteurs, unproductive, etc. (similar to civ4, where it is not a decrease in efficiency, but an actual net cost v. the imperial treasury) would be good.

The key problem with Civ's System is that you couldn't dismiss colonies only military units. If after founding a colony, your situation changes so that it is not profitable, you should be able to let that colony go independent (ie in civ terms let it become a Barbarian city) If the 'money' is required to keep your people from rebelling, then a lack of 'money' is dealt with by simply letting them rebel. (thus shrinking your empire and its costs.) If you let them go voluntarily they might be somewhat friendly with you and provide a valuable buffer/information conduit/trade partner. But keeping them as a strong ally should require 'money' as well, so that diplomatic relationship would probably be neglected.


As for Espionage points.... I think that should be folded into 'Money', probably with caps on how much you can spend for a particular task (ie Espionage v. an empire/world being a meter that you can build over time with 'money' at a certain rate+efficiency)

Essentially I would use 'Money' for all "population manipulation" tasks, ie keeping planets and fleets loyal, maintaining an efficient government, maintaining strong allies, and espionage in enemy empires.