Population Growth

Sokari wrote: I think it would be a nice idea to allow trade routes - allow people to make money based on ships traveling from one colony to another bigger colony = bigger payoff

sort of your standard longer distance and bigger colony = more payoff per run. I think it would be quite easy to implement, reduce the need for seeding thousands of cash colonies and would also add "life" to the system seeing ships flying all over the place doing their own things.


lets say player X wants to set up a trade route with player Y, they'd goto the trade post click a button to send a trade route request to player Y (with selecting a planet from both players). Player Y then gets an in game mail asking if they want to accept, if they select yes and have good relations with each other then an npc ship will spawn with a route to go from one trade post to the other and back and give XXX credits per tick while it's active.

if you mixed that with the better buildings idea then you can have your giant colonies that are hard to manage but will give a substantial rewards.

Oooo I love this idea!

Desertfox wrote: I don't like it.

trade bonuses between your empire and empires you know about are already in the game. Making trade routes by hand only adds micromanagement without adding gameplay. And it is not a replacement: people will make trade routes AND make more cash colonies, leading to even more hyperinflation.

I think we should start by determining the exact problem and determining why that problem is a problem, before deciding on a solution.

The problem is that colonies give an income instead of a one-time cash grant so the best way to get rich is build lots of colonies. This will eventually crowd out all other forms of money making, and leads to hyperinflation.

The trade income between neighboring empires should be changed anyway. It shouldn't be based on each player's entire empire. It should be based on the specific colonies that are within a certain distance of each other. This would give a huge advantage to large colonies, which is one of the things we all agree we're looking for.

If we really want to do away with cash colonies, then I think the solution is to change the morale effects so that smaller colonies cannot have a higher tax rate than larger colonies. Make the morale effects of taxes the same regardless of population and the reason for cash colonies ceases to exist. You'll still want to spread out some so you don't have all of your eggs in one basket, but you won't have any specific reason to build a "cash colony" anymore.