So far in my play testing I've seen no real benefit to doing anything but spamming colony ships to expand as quickly as possible. More planets = more population = more money and trade routes/science/production, etc. I'm curious to hear the dev's thoughts on the topic of tall vs wide empires, which is something that is discussed quite often in 4x games. Is the game designed to always benefit a larger empire or will smaller empires have some advantages of their own?

Are there plans to offer game mechanisms that will reward a player for not engaging in aggressive colony spamming straight from the start of the game? Will certain races be better suited to building smaller, but more efficient empires? Perhaps certain technologies will be more valuable to a smaller empire than a larger one? I imagine if a morale or happiness system is built into the game that could be used as a soft limit of colony spamming.

I realize the focus of testing and patches for now is on technical issues, but I am curious about what, if any, plans are being formulated for addressing tall vs wide empire mechanics later on during development.

Right now the AI empires aren't offering much in the way of competition (they're expanding slowly if at all and hardly building anything larger than a scout), so there's not much of a penalty for focusing exclusively on expansion. As we make the AI players more aggressive and continue to add more devious third-party threats, expanding rapidly without building infrastructure or a fleet should become a much riskier prospect. (Back in alpha when the AI players were spamming colony ships like mad, they were harder to ignore.)

At the moment, the economic model is somewhat bare bones; there are only three resources, three building types and three levels of upgrade for each building. We have plans to increase the number and types of resources and buildings (like farms and mines), to add special resources (such as Tendao's opil crystals) that can be used as trade goods, and to make the trade system more interesting and rewarding. Certain factions such as the Phidi or Orthin might have particular benefits for building taller rather than wider. But at a fundamental level, I think this kind of game is first and foremost about exploration and expansion and the clash of fleets; I don't imagine that we'll have a Civ V Vanilla style victory condition in which you build only one or two colonies and then turtle and spam culture improvements and hit Next Turn repeatedly.

But then, I suppose one should never say never.