Easy fix for fixing tall vs. wide?

[espana33]

Make wide empires have to keep a garrison of armies and ships in all of their far flung holdings, if not, huge divergence/rebellion/secessionist whatever penalty.

Then make a racial trait buff that's very expensive that helps minimize that like if your race is a hive mind insectoid type deal, it doesn't hit you as hard, but then that should stifle your research or something else like leader quality.

Then it's a real question about the payoff of being giant, yeah you get the huge resources and fleet but you're stuck paying for it and can't necessarily use it all without risking planets hopping away. Could play nicely into a ascension/decline mechanic where on a decline you really start to get penalized.

Seems like low hanging fruit to fix this with a few more buffs for being tall and orbital habitats etc. Or whatever else they add in.

Side note after you conquer the galaxy, you should be allowed to invade another galaxy and be the intergalactic scourge yourself.

 

[Jorgen_CAB]

Make wide empires have to keep a garrison of armies and ships in all of their far flung holdings, if not, huge divergence/rebellion/secessionist whatever penalty.

Then make a racial trait buff that's very expensive that helps minimize that like if your race is a hive mind insectoid type deal, it doesn't hit you as hard, but then that should stifle your research or something else like leader quality.

Then it's a real question about the payoff of being giant, yeah you get the huge resources and fleet but you're stuck paying for it and can't necessarily use it all without risking planets hopping away. Could play nicely into a ascension/decline mechanic where on a decline you really start to get penalized.

Seems like low hanging fruit to fix this with a few more buffs for being tall and orbital habitats etc. Or whatever else they add in.

Side note after you conquer the galaxy, you should be allowed to invade another galaxy and be the intergalactic scourge yourself.

It would be better if the sector mechanic was expanded so that the core imperial fleet only can partially use their Naval Capacity and sectors keep their own local fleets. If you have a large empire a sector far way from a conflict might actually take some influence to convince to commit forces while sector close to a conflict more inclined to keep their ships in their own sector to protect it.

This would form some more interesting political power play within an empire. Different government could deal with these issues in different ways.

In my opinion planets in general should be more inclined to want as much autonomy over its own development as is possible, this would also include some token defence in the form af ships in addition to defensive installations in addition to sector fleets.

This would make far and wide empires so much more realistic in my opinion and really show the difference between a smaller richer empire versus a larger less developed empire. The smaller empire might even be able to mass larger and more powerful local fleets than a much larger empire if the larger empire don't have enough control over its own areas.

I would like some sort of autonomy system as we have in EU4, both for sectors and planets. Only core planets should be able to have very low autonomy levels close to zero. The more autonomy a planet or sector have the more of the resources they produce will be earmarked for their own development. So a planet with an autonomy of 80% would keep 80% of all mineral production for developing its own planet, so each planet would keep a note on how much resources it has. If a player build something on a planet you may use say half of that store and half of your own resources, otherwise the planet use those resources to build whatever they want to build. The same with sector storages.

 

[Vaar]

I think this is the wrong path to take for fixing the problem. I also disagree with an easy fix for something so important. I think that planet improvements and an economy would fix the problem, and are basically required.

Planet improvements, such as in many 4x games, would mean that a small empire could focus it's resources on a small number of powerful and efficient planets. While large empires would be pouring their resources into expanding and unable to improve their planets to the same level. Looking at the current game, this could be a huge boost to tall empire's research as well. It could take the form of ring world construction, as well as, specialized, improved planets that produce more resources and living space. Imagine that one system could be optimized to be as powerful as 8-12 systems of a large empire.

A working economy would also help as a larger empire loses efficiency. Producing and moving goods around means more trade ships and gaining less from each planet. With the new addition of consumer goods, a large empire with inefficient population would be a strain on resources. A large empires economy would also be much more vulnerable to attacks on trade, lose far more resources to sectors and so on.