New patch: goodbye to mass colony rush?

[brycej]

Changed with the patch:
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"Population growth fixed dramatically. This is going to have a significant game play result that we're still having to fix in the AI. Before, on a class 10 planet with a morale of 70 your population would increase at 20% per turn. Now is would change at 3%.

The "population growth ability bug" wasn't a bug but rather a problem with having populations in billions rather than millions. The population growth was previously capped at 200 million per turn. 20% of say 1 billion (or
higher) reached that cap. So all those bonuses meant nothing.

New change with the patch:
Now, at 3%, if you have a population of 1 billion then you're looking at an increase of 30 million per turn X your population bonus. If your morale is 100%, that gets doubled again.

Here's the thing: If you drain a population down to only a few billion, it'll take you a very long time to recover. Say goodbye to mass colony rush. You'll need to be very careful or else you could end up with a vast empire of tiny populations producing no money while smaller empires grow beyond you and conquer your weak but large empire.

Population Growth = CurrentMorale X Government Level X PlanetQuality Factory X GrowthFactor."
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WIll this be popular? I enjoyed grabbing planets. It is what I normally expect in 4x games? Expand, expand.

If expansion becomes too much of a loser, and all I am doing is tweaking my planets, a lot of fun goes out the window.
Am I missing something? Is it just my taste?

How about an option for which system to use?

I guess I could stay with the old patch but I would miss out on the other goodies.

[Solver]

This sounds excellent to me. To the point where I'll want to download it and play GalCiv2 again. IMO, colony rush was one of the biggest problems of GalCiv2. It was the One Right Thing (TM) to do, you just had to grab more planets (and you could outdo the AI at it), and the increased population from more planets helped you a LOT.

[Brizey]

I agree with Solver. Every game started the same: Buy five colony ships, load 'em up and send them to the nearest six systems with your initial freebie, then recorrect the few that went to dead systems to those with more than one planet. Rinse. Repeat.

[Stuie]

I hated the early colony rush. There was no thought and no strategy involved whatsoever. Just rush colony ships and go grab everything in sight.

Hopefully this change will force the player to scout more for good planets and carefully select colony locations.

Guess I'll have to d/l the patch and give it a whirl tonight.

[Hansolo88]

I haven't played using the new patch yet, but I did play some using the last public Beta, Beta-4A, which I think had most if not all of the changes implemented.

I would actually say that the system is starting to feel more like Civilization 4. I was still able to rush-build colony ships and colonize as fast as possible, but once the rush was over I had major economic difficulties. Maintenence and spending skyrocketed with all those colonies but my income was pathetic. There were a few more colonies that I would have liked to have gotten but I simply didn't have the income to build colony ships fast enough. I had to tremendously reduce spending; raising taxes only helps so much because if you cut down your approval you lose population growth and hurt yourself in the long run. It took a while to recover, but once I did of course I was doing great.

It's gonna take a lot more playing and testing to determine whether or not this really makes super-fast growth a bad idea, or whether it just makes it harder to do; after all, those are two very different things. The economic model of this game is so complex that no simple answer will do. But I will say that it now feels a lot like Civ 4, in that you can still ICS but you pay for it afterwards and if you overdo it you can really hurt yourself for a long while.

I think one of the biggest questions I still have is what Brad ended up deciding to use as a tax formula. Is it linear, or does it reward large population planets or small population planets? At one point he talked about using a system that was proportional to the square-root of the population, thus rewarding smaller population planets and encouraging colony rushing. I hope this is not the case now; if anything, larger population planets would have more citizens available for service-type jobs and would create proportionally more commerce. Anyways, I think the answer to this question will determine whether or not super-fast colony rushing is still the "best method".

[ArtNJ]

Rushing is usually still the best method. Each new colony costs 12 in maintenance per turn -- but with .5 billion pop, the income is around 4-6. So its not a big cash drain at all. If you build nothing on a colony, it will be profitable relatively quickly, and you can use its starting production to do some research.

There is some additional cost because your main planet will earn less with lower pop, because the colony ships aren't free and because you will need 100% morale (or at least racial advantages) to sustain a rush where you are sending .5 bill, or close to it, out to the new colonies. To avoid having taxes really low you need two moral buildings on your home planet and I also like 10% moral racial advantage. Not a trivial expense, but not a huge sacrifice or cost.


What is a huge cash drain is wrongly thinking you need to be building up every colony at maximum speed. That leads to a serious cash crunch that messes with all of your growth curves. In the early rush, it can be perfectly logical to use some of the early colonies starting production to bolster your research (say on engines) rather than immediately building 2 or 3 factories. Later in the rush, you need to find a balance between what your building, your income and your needs. Its perfectly fine to spend more than you take in, but if your already hemmoraging 100 credits a turn with a treasury of say 2,000, should you be spending money to build more research centers, or spending the money you would use building on research. In other words, do you want more research now, or the theoretical ability to do more research later, which would theoretically allow you to catch up (or leapfrog ahead) but may run you into a cash crunch which will may actually leave you worse off in the long run?

[Silver14]

It’s easier to rush the free colonies now then take them over later IMO. The AI doesn't seem to waste any time exploding its expansion still.

Rapid expansion now feels a bit like Civ IV in that your economy can have a heart attack until your people start populating the worlds. Once your pop grows it quickly flips though. I've dropped my capacity slider to 20% at times with early colony rushes and still losing some money, try to balance out mil/soc/res as best as possible as well.

Once the pop grows I can pull the slider up to 100% and make money for awhile until larger military and larger unhappy populations reduce it.

I'm currently playing on 'tough' difficulty with 9 'intelligent' opponents, huge map. I focused on expansion and still didn't get as many as I had hoped for.

If only I had explored a bit more I would have found a beautiful 34 class planet not to far from me but the Korx got it. Besieging this world is going to be a pain but it must be done.



:drool: My precious!

[tetley]

I don't think the mass colony rush is over at all in 1.1, especially if you take the pop growth bonus.

[brycej]

I was the original poster. I haven't tried to advanced AI but I think you are right. It's still what you need to do.
Rush, rush, rush. Maybe a tad slower so that you don't empty a colony's popoulation.