Will playing 'tall' be a viable option?

[kettch]

I get the feeling most of you are somewhat 'limited' in their thoughts by what the constantly cited 'most 4X-games' look like. So I would like to try to give you a different take on how 'tall' nations can work in 4X. My reference for this is Stars!, a game probably older than the term 4X itself. In Stars!, you are pretty much completely free to design your race how you wish.
This includes among others:
- Population Growth
- Productivity of Pops
- Number of Planets you are likely to be able to live on (and how well you can live on them).
- Cost of Factories (Factories=Production Capacity)
- Productivity of Factories
- Max. Number of Factories per Pop

If you balance those out right and adding in the Possibility to remote mine uncolonized Plantes and to synthesize needed Materials from 'wortless materials' (which can as well be improve as a racial trait) , you can easily build a race that can live only on a handful of planets, which take long to develop but can get extremely strong in terms of productive power and research.

I actually took part in a multiplayer match of 16 Players once, where the last 3 Races were a Hyper-Colonizer owning like 2/3s of the galaxy(~600 playets I think), a Warmonger owning most of the rest and a 'Tall Race' owning like 10-15 Planets, but being evenly matched as he had stronger Production than the Warmonger and better Tech than the Hyper-Colonizer.

In Stellaris, this will most certainly be harder to get to work nicely, but my point is, this can work pretty well, given you are not hardcapped on certain things (like productivity per Capita).

 

[Jorgen_CAB]

In my opinion if going by a "realistic" approach then there should not be any particular population limit on planets as long as you can support the material and energy needed to support the infrastructure on that planet to support the population on it.

I also don't think that empires can't be both tall and wide at the same time and I do think that most empires should have the vast majority of their population on a very select few planets with some scattered population on less suitable planets who are more specialized planets such as mining, production and/or science focused.

Expansion into the universe should be more about exploration and resource gathering rather than spreading your population around, that seem counter productive and expensive resource wise to me.

So... essentially it should be important to both build your empire tall and wide at the same time. There could be some racial trait that make it preferable to spread population but for the most part I really think that the majority of population would gather in a few very large population centers as that seem to be the most efficient use of resources and intellectual capital.

The biggest constraint for spreading population around in many places in large quantities should be in the form of governmental control and cultural divergence that should always follow. This is the same problem you would face even if you only had say three super huge planets with population on. At some time in the future each world would diverge in its culture enough that they rather govern themself than being part of a bigger empire.
The problem would arise when these worlds will divide up smaller resources such as mining, industrial and research worlds... here we could see some conflicts and wars.