Colony Dynamics

[johnmcd]

I think it's a bit of a shame that colonies never get to out grow the parent in Civ IV. If the motherland is crushed under the jack boot of Sumarian shock troops or whatever then , yes, they can end up bigger and more important; but that's not what I mean.

I think that if new colonies were given a Golden Age on their creation, or perhaps half price settlers and workers for the rest of the game or something it would encourage really interesting colony decisions. At the moment, I use colonies to block islands from rivals and little else. It would be nice to feel that in setting up a colony you were perhaps sowing the seeds of your own destruction.

[Theben]

Well if you have a small nation and you make a colony on a huge sparsely populated land, that could happen, yes. But players know to expand as much as they can and there's no real benefits to keeping a small nation with empire, aka Britain or the Netherlands.
Try modding a standard game to include Rhye's (stability?) calculations in it and you might have some interesting games, or add something that allows for more trade based on location... doubt that's possible.