Reposting a suggestion I made in another thread, what if self-sufficient worlds had reduced empire sprawl costs compared to specialized worlds?
The basic idea is that if a world has any resource in deficit, it would gain a proportionate empire sprawl cost. This would represent the administrative work needed to deal with the logistics of transporting and allocating resources properly to every world in an empire, and would give self-sufficient worlds the benefit of requiring less administrative oversight compared to more specialized ones. When an empire is over its admin cap, worlds with deficits could also gain a stability penalty that scales with the size of the deficit, to represent the chaos that would be caused if such a dependent world lost the ability to reliably import the resources it needs.
If this were implemented well, there could possibly be an interesting decision between building specialized and self-sufficient worlds. The former would create a highly efficient and centralized empire, but one which requires a high degree of administrative oversight to function and becomes more vulnerable to disruptions. The latter would give a less efficient and more decentralized empire, but one able to maintain a greater number of stable worlds which require less administration and can take care of themselves when necessary.
The basic idea is that if a world has any resource in deficit, it would gain a proportionate empire sprawl cost. This would represent the administrative work needed to deal with the logistics of transporting and allocating resources properly to every world in an empire, and would give self-sufficient worlds the benefit of requiring less administrative oversight compared to more specialized ones. When an empire is over its admin cap, worlds with deficits could also gain a stability penalty that scales with the size of the deficit, to represent the chaos that would be caused if such a dependent world lost the ability to reliably import the resources it needs.
If this were implemented well, there could possibly be an interesting decision between building specialized and self-sufficient worlds. The former would create a highly efficient and centralized empire, but one which requires a high degree of administrative oversight to function and becomes more vulnerable to disruptions. The latter would give a less efficient and more decentralized empire, but one able to maintain a greater number of stable worlds which require less administration and can take care of themselves when necessary.
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