Yeah, the expansion rush at the beginning is kinda disappointing. Master of Orion 2 alleviated this by not giving you a jackpot amount to start with, allowing you to buy out a ton of colony ships.

Even if colony ships cost more or you had less starting cash you would still start out the same way - in a rush to colonize the best worlds around you asap to beat the AIs to it.

It's a core feature to this game and pretty much every space-based 4x game. Expand is the 2nd of the 4 X's, ya know.

Yeah, the expansion rush at the beginning is kinda disappointing. Master of Orion 2 alleviated this by not giving you a jackpot amount to start with, allowing you to buy out a ton of colony ships.

I would completely disagree and you are wrong - because even in MOO2 you would colonize every good planet as fast as you could build and reach them. The only limiting factor was production speed and range - there were no other priorities except maybe fending off an early rush.

The dealio is - if you give EVERYONE a decent sized lump sum of starting cash then everyone is on even ground and has a much more equal chance at fast expansion. If you only give out a tiny amount of starting cash then those races with significant econ or production bonuses expand faster EVERY time and it's never remotely fair. Races with such benefits still get a nice boost from those abilities throughout the game, but they don't enjoy an unfair advantage at the start of the game where it's much more critical that all races be on somewhat even ground.

No matter how you slice it, in a space based 4X game colonizing everything in sight asap is critical and there will always be a "land rush".

only to try to prevent AI colonization rush.

The AIs are simply playing smart - planets are the backbone of your empire. The more planets you have the better. The earlier you acquire raw planets the earlier you can develop them to make them useful If you choose not to compete you may as well surrender early since you're basically saying you're not playing to win.

It's generally not so bad on a Huge or Gigantic map, unless you start off near a major race.
I've been on map where I was the only one around with plenty of habitable planets. I took my time, and it was cool because it gave me something to do while building starbases and such.

If they introduced a "max colony" factor that accounted for tech/income/etc., it could be interesting... but I can see a lot more people complaining about that, as opposed to complaining about how the game currently works.

It would be nifty to be able to start with all suitable planets already colonized, or at least 5 worlds a piece or something. I don't mind the land rush too much, but it does start to get old.

-Dewar

If they introduced a "max colony" factor that accounted for tech/income/etc., it could be interesting...

I would be against this "max colony factor", but i would that colonizing would be more costly than it is at this stage.I heard that Brad was going to link population to production in a future patch, it could be a first step to balance colonization rush, i would also the introduction of mainteinance based on distance from capital, this shouldn't prevent fast colonization but would at least counterbalance income and losses

Nah. Keep it the way it is.

I like rushing out to get colonies at the start. It's fun to gamble at how close your enemies are by pushing that colony ship out just a little further, maybe there's a lvl 12 instead of this 8 you just approached? etc.
The first game had alot of little logistics challenges to the colony rush. You had more limited range so you would have to chain your ships out so that you colonized the back planets just as your front ships hit their frontier on range and could then go further. Nice little challenges like that are fun.

I really prefer the cheaper constructors in GC2. The first game took years before you could get your first constructor and it always seemed like the enemies started with at least one.

I actually liked how MOO2 did the balancing of the colony rush. Basically if you started in the "pre-warp" tech age you had poor production capabilities + the colony ships were very expensive to make. The player is then faced with 2 choices, tech up the industry/research and then industrialize your main world, being able to only colonize the planets in your own system OR you could research colony ships + engines so that you can go out and try to explore the stars early (but the problem was you had poor industrial base and actually built the colony ships slower). The reason i liked this system over the one that GC currently has for teh sandbox game becuase it made sense to actually make scout ships. in GC2 i find that scout ships are basically worthless and therefore never make any ( i just build colony ships that travel 2 par/week (same mobility as scout) and use that to explore. Eventually as i start to trade with other civs i just trade them for their scout ships (if you do it right trading techs in GC2 is the uber money maker early in the game.)

anywayz there's my 2 cents worth and hope someone out there enjoys what i wrote!