[MarcoPolo]

This sounds like an intriguing idea to planet and resource management.

What I want to know is whether a players empire will have autonomous and self sufficient planet resources, ie will they be almost like city states in CIV? What I mean is if a planet experiences starvation if growing faster than the infrustructure... then in Civilization there is little a player can do to aid one city over another, they basically are at the mercy of what the city micromanagement screen permits and will not help if the city infrastructure is maxed out. This kind of defeats the purpose of having an empire if you cannot stretch one city to its limits with the full support of the outlying colonies. Kind of like Rome, where all the riches can be hoarded to the capital from the provinces (which is what historically happened in Rome) to truly prosper and bring with it more wealth.

I always felt that it would be nice to allow the player the ability to push production in favour of having a larger capital or core planets with the support of outlying colonies being specialised to specific tasks. Like science (ie science moon colony) or manufacturing/production (asteroid refineries) ..so that a player can diversify and actually not just capture planets in order to just found more and more pointless colonies. Its wonderful to have alot of Earths to manage, but also making Earths not so abundant and having the choice of also settling rocks that are more geared for production than population would be interesting too.

It would open up other possibilities, and maybe even change the dynamics to waging war on an opponent (if say he has many many moons and asteroids that taking over 1 or 2 of his earth planets, will still not impact him since his production power lies in his control of the stars with huge asteroid and moon resources) Perhaps making moons and asteroids easier to colonies and less inefficient and specialised would throw a spanner in the works, from having to see countless 4X games in the past fall quickly into drudgery of many earth planets micromanagement.

Just my 2c