Arioch wrote:Applying a tech penalty to large empires would essentially be an incentive to turtle, and I'm not sure that's a good incentive. This is a game of expansion, and if you choose not to expand, more power to you... but the game in that case should be fairly difficult.
Thats a danger, thats true, but you will not want to do it if you want to win. In practice you dont turtle in SD2, so their empire penalty rule is not really an incentive to turtle, because even if you dont progress that much in technology as in other games, your capital ship output is still bigger than that of smaller empires. The idea behind the empire penalty is that even smaller AI empires half your size will give you a fair fight because their ships have nearly the same tech than yours, and are no overwalk. Yes, you will win the combat, but only because you have more military output.
CIV circumvents this case by cheating heavily and giving its smaller nations insane technology boni. I find that approach unfairly scripted and uncreative and I would avoid it at all cost.
Arioch wrote:There should perhaps be scaling monetary costs for increasing empire sizes, as large empires do cost money to manage. I'm just not sure that principle applies as directly to research.
IMO, ideally a scaling should mostly apply to research and not to empire size. I am doing game design myself and when I designed my 4x game I seperated tech and military output totally by giving each player a fixed amount of research points regardless of empire size. In our groups this separation does wonder because it support smaller empires to hold their own against larger ones. It makes always for a different a VERY interesting and very tactical playing experience.
But I know my approach is not mainstream. In mainstream 4x everbody wants to HAVE to have research labs or whatever. Nobody seems to care about that this approach always leads a one way strategy which is: expand as fast as you can.
Arioch wrote:I think scaling tech costs for different maps sizes may make sense. The concern then would be that the early game on a large map could be unnecessarily slow.
To circumvent this you could on larger maps make late techs more expensive while maintaing the standard tech cost of early techs.
Of course all this is only valid if you really intend to make larger galaxies than what you have now.
But somewhere I read a whopping 300 systems which I personally would find great. Thats the sole reason why I opened this thread.