[Lemmy]

Originally posted by Nodachi:
If you allow the AI to colonize they're going to have a huge advantage over the humans.

True, but that is the challenge off course
And besides, someone has to do the researching, if everyone only has 1 planet, research would take forever.
And the advantage isn't that big, especially if we give the OPC-players better robo-miners.
I'm currently in a game, where robo-miners give 900 minerals instead of 600, and i also added 3 extra shipsizes called small, medium, and large resourcer, sizes 300kt, 600kt, 900kt.
I can colonize planets, but i don't have mining facilities, and my research centers only give 300 points. Currently i'm ranked first with the most ships, and i still have a 10k mineral surplus. I'm currently using the 600kt ships for resourcing.

There are a million things we could do to counter the research loss. I like the idea of having to capture ships for tech (kind of like P&N). Boarding parties at game start would probably be easiest to do. Then at higher levels change it over to a ranged attack based on the AS, commando torpedoes!

Yep, like that idea too of capturing tech.
We could also create a small analyzing component, to analyze tech on location, instead of having it bring to a spaceyard.
The component would technically be a spaceyard, but with zero production rate, and a lot smaller, maybe 50kt.