[spoon]

In the group I've been playing with, we've tried the following:

- Rush Prevention: Can't attack another homeworld for x turns (10-20)

- Lame Start Prevention: If any player starts with his homesystem blocked in by other players and/or black holes, then he can call for a restart by turn 10. (for our latest map, we had someone make a map for us, to ensure no players started in adjacent postitions. Very nice change from what we had in past maps - if you want, I can make a map for your next game...

- Low tech start / high tech cost -- lets you play with tech longer before needing to upgrade, makes racial techs less powerful (which can be a negative point, depending on how you look at it)

- Medium sized galaxy for 8 players (meet sooner with less chance of someone already being an unstoppable powerhouse. again,weakens racial techs, which may be good or bad...)
- Ban Intelligence (too all-or-nothing)

- Ban Surrender (and ban the work-around for surrendering (giving away all your planets...)

- Ban Tech Trading -- the only way to trade tech is by giving another player a ship, and having him scrap and analyze it. Slows the speed of tech developement down by quite a bit, which we all liked.

- Ban gifting colony ships (this is a biggie - prevents someone from getting all the colonization techs by virtue of his location to players with different starting colony tech...)

- Turn off events and ruins (too potentially unbalancing).

- Decide on how many players can be declared the "Victor". This was in response to our first game, where a coalition of 3 players ended up winning the game against the other coalition of 4 players. We now prefer "only one shall reign!" You can still make alliances, of course, but like in Risk, there can only be one winner. This makes the political side of the game more interesting, in my opinion. More intrigue. And no one gets too mad at the backstab, since you knew it had to be coming at some point...

- Decide what to do if someone quits. Getting a replacement player can sometimes take forever. gifting away planets can be unbalancing. This happened in our most recent game (on turn 20) so we just split his empire up amongst the two newbies...

Good luck with your next game!
-Spoon