Some good ideas there.
a) make a huge maintenance cost per colony; something that would really make you think twice about : "Do i want a 4th colony or i should wait until the ones i have start producing some income ?"This can be done, since there is a different building for the initial colony and the colonies that come afterwards
colony modules should't cary more than 50 (not 500) colonists. this should force you into transporting population into more than one colony ship to a new colony to help it out.This can also be done since you can specify the number of colonists/troops in a ship module. At one point, I had a variation whereby you could research further colony modules that gradually became cheaper and could hold more people. I may very well reinstigate that.
Incidentally, I don't know if you know this, perhaps it's a bug or an exploit, but you can use colony ships to transport to and from existing colonies without the ship being used up!
c) lower the population growth significantly. as i said, a colony to be able to outgrow the homeworld in just a few turns is just wrong.Again - it can be done. At one point in my experiments, I had the pop cap at half the intial amount given. You can alter pop cap increases from farms. And you can alter the initial population growth rate, like I did with range, say set it initially to -100!
d) lower the ammount of troops that can be carried in a troop module as well; this could be an easy exploit by the player.Same answer as
it would be very cool if it was pozzzible to limit the number of colonies a player has at one time by some tech (let's say government system) but i dont believe that this is moddable.No, not so far as I know. You could fiddle with planet quality - perhaps -10 for each new colony, but that would effect existing ones.
As regards range, I'm thinking the problem partly stems from being able to jam extended range modules into ships. They are only size 2. I'm thinking of making them size 10 and stripping them off all the ship designs. If you want them, you have to fit them yourself and you have to find room for them. However, I also want to allow scouts to go a bit further than other ships (particularly colony ships), as they should, like in Master of Orion. So, you can explore a little further but you can't do much else until after more research.
