Do colony ships build too quickly?

[raynor]

Has anyone given any thought to increasing the cost of a colonization component to 20,000 or 30,000 minerals?

In a HUGE galaxy, that would slow things down to such a crawl that a game would take a lifetime to play. But in a small galaxy, it might produce a different game that is still worth playing.

Expansion would be much slower. But at the same time, you would have many fewer planets to micro-manage.

I guess in the long run, it would make the game much less fun to play because you would have much less of everything coming in. Production of new ships would be slower without enough minerals coming in. Research would be slowed because of the lack of room for facilities.

I had thought that this might create a game where you had a smaller number of much more important colonies defended by a small but much more important fleet of ships. Now that I think about it, though, it would probably slow a 'resource based game' like this to such a crawl that it wouldn't be worth playing.

(Yeah... I really must have too much time on my hands to be thinking of crazy stuff like this...)


[This message has been edited by raynor (edited 31 January 2001).]

[Seawolf]

Not to mention that everyone would just use emergency build forever.

------------------
Seawolf on the prowl

[Baron Munchausen]

I think my reply to your other post covers this pretty well if you think about the implications of "work time" as a resource. A colony module would be one of the most complex things you could build. It would probably have the highest cost of any single component, even stellar manipulation components! And with "work time" as a resource you'd value your population much more highly than you tend to now. You'd have to be much more careful about placing new colonies even if you have the colony modules. Getting a few hundred million colonists killed on an undefended world could be a disater.

[apache]

Well, personally, I would rather make all ships much more expensive based on class. I really think its too easy to build a whole bunch of warships real quick.
I also think that maintainance is a little askew. It should be much easier to maintain a large fleet of escorts rather than a small fleet of Dreadnoughts that both cost the same amount to build. Of course, this might cripple the AI since it only builds dreadnoughts once it gets them.