Are tall empires viable anymore?

[Pancakelord]

Someone mentioned mass effect style branching gateways, with gateway nodes that are upgraded or something. At the time I erroneously said that's not how mass effect gateways work but I was wrong. That might be a cool way to add complexity without feeling like a gamey hard cap.

That was me lol. I can see something like that happening in a mod, but not officially. They will probably lock down where gateways can spawn, rather than expand logic that drastically. We only got increased bypass logic with dystant stars, just to make the L-cluster work one-way (and that was a big improvement, letting me remake old wormhole stations, but it's still got some limits that need clunky work-arounds to really do mass relays justice).

Also, this is what I meant earlier by only some planets permitting gateways (this is for habitats, but you get the idea, for gateways it'd just be a different icon, over the star, for UI purposes + script checks, and once the megastructure is built the resource vanishes).

Don't mind the weird tooltip text, I think I've got it pointing to the wrong scripted text. Its only visible, if you can build a habitat, too. Like how old strat resources would hide themselves without meeting some condition.

if all resources were managed via trade routes, your first point is nixed.

True. Yet, if all resources were managed by trade routes, they'd probably have to gut the current "everything to the homeworld" model and redo it from scratch to be two way, as it'd make no sense to route everything home, if say your alloy foundries are elsewhere (which I'd love - but I dont see them adding 2-way trade routes with a little tooltip saying "Trade flowing on route X alloys flowing on route Y [resource] flowing on this route [Z]".

10 energy/month for each connection.

each connection? you mean

(X*(X-1))/2=Y
X = # gateways
Y = # connections
e.g. 5 gateways would = 10 connections, or 10*10 = 100 EC a month to maintain.

Could work domestically, but penalising someone for having outbound links to other nations (as gateways don't constrain themselves) with open borders isnt good, and will only lock down the galaxy further as opening your borders will bankrupt you lol (and I'm one of those freaky people that thinks the game is too locked down as it is, with closed borders being magical bs).

 

[Franton]

Could work domestically, but penalising someone for having outbound links to other nations (as gateways don't constrain themselves) with open borders isnt good,

True. it might make sense to limit the gateway connection upkeep to those within your own territory, as only those will be used for trade routes! (to my knowledge trade routes never go through foreign gateways even if you have access to the systems).

 

[HFY]

It would leave an open question on what happens to the pair wormhole, though.

Yeah, and I don't really have a great answer for that part.

One obvious solution would be that you lose one end of the natural wormhole or the other -- but that's only reasonable for a human player, who can make the strategic decision with a smidgen of intelligence.

 

[Strangedane]

Against the AI anything is viable.

Against human players it has never been.