- Tall strategy: few but big colonies, favours boosts to population and pop-based boosts to output.
- Wide strategy: many but small colonies, favours flat bonuses to output.
Even if we arrange techs so that there is a well differentiated path for flat and pop-based bonuses, the fact that early techs are much cheaper than later ones would invite/force players to research all branches more or less equally. And that makes not going Wide a voluntary suicide.
With current gama balance, there is no way an empire with few colonies can stand a chance against an empire with say twice the colonies.
We need to ensure that going Wide makes hard to go Tall (and vice versa, but that is irrelevant for now). With policies I think we can get it.
We also need to balance the output of few big colonies and many small colonies.
Bonuses and maluses for Tall policies:
- Bonus to target population.
- Bonus to population growth rate.
- Malus to colony part/building cost and time.
- Flat malus to influence per colony, based on distance to capital to encourage narrow empires, but maybe we want Tall-but-spread empires also viable and thus the malus should be flat.
- Bonus to colony part/building cost and time.
- Flat bonus to influence per colony, based on distance to capital to encourage spread empires, or just flat.
- Malus to target population.
- Malus to population growth rate.
Tall policies:
- Bonus to target population.
- Bonus to population growth rate.
- Bonus to colony part/building cost and time.
- Flat bonus to influence per colony, based on distance to capital to encourage spread empires, or just flat.
Another thing outside of policies that can help, maybe decisively, to make Tall a viable strategy is that troop/colony parts and buildings consume local troops/population.