Colony ships, for sale cheap!

[geoschmo]

Not a bad thought. You could really go higher than 10 times if you wanted to. I am not sure what the absolute limit is in the components.txt file. It would definetly be an easy way to slow down expansion and stretch out games.

Would give more of an incentive to capture planets instead of glassing them.

You would need to consider ship maintenance though. If you went very high on the cost of the colony comp, you could conceivably push the maint so high that an empire just starting out could not even afford to have one, and thus you would never be able to get beyond your homeworld. You could add an ability to the colony component to reduce ship maint to counter that I guess.

Geoschmo