I know the colony rush can be a bit predictable and nerve-wracking, but I don't think this would fix what you're trying to fix. It will be the same game dynamic, just adding a rush down the logistics tree as part of the initial colony rush. You wouldn't be able to research anything else, without losing a territorial/economy advantage later in the game. None of the AI's would want to trade anything else but logistics tech in the initial rush. It would eliminate a lot of the fun in researching and horse-trading different tech lines in the early game.

It's possible to slow down the rush a little by using the larger map sizes, uncommon habitable planets, and tight clusters. That makes it a little harder to "colony hop" and automatically extend your ships' range. You might be forced to stop and research (or trade for) better life support and sensor range to reach the more distant prizes. And the AI civs will have the same handicap on those maps.

@Citizen Poole -- I don't like sending colony ships out blind either, mainly because I hate it when they "dead end" and I end up not being able to use them. What I do is purchase fast (custom) sensor ships, in-between every colony ship purchase, until I run out of money. Then I build alternating sensor and colony ships. That gives me several sensor ships to explore with, and the sensor picture of the neighborhood doesn't disappear as each colony is settled (which is what happens if you only use colony ships in the initial rush). You'll have a better chance of stumbling on another civ for trade, also. After the initial rush, I park the sensor ships on the borderline as static sentries, to keep an eye on things. It costs me roughly one colony ship to build those sensor ships in the initial rush, but I'm more efficient in where I send the colony ships, and I make trade contacts faster.

Actually, GalCiv, thanks to its emphesis on starbases, can almost work out OK without the land-grab phase of the game.

The reason is that starbases make cities better. And if you focus on them, it makes them betterer. The reasons why this isn't enough are 2-fold:

1: You need tech to get them and to get upgrades (and tech to get more of them). The guy with more raw land will get tech faster than you.

2: The guy with more land can also exploit starbases.

At the same time, I think GalCiv deals with this better than most strategy games, because it ultimately forces a perfectionist strategy. A game of Civlization can be won just by building dozens of cities. But unless you're playing on a planet-rich, large galaxy, you're going to run out of room fairly soon. This forces you to go for improving what you've got better than the other guy.

Not only would each colony placement become more important lending a greater depth to colonisation, but this would make sense thematically as well - if logistics needs to be researched to shove a few ships together, surely it would be needed to co-ordinate a galaxy wide federation of planets, no?

Do that, and all you do is make everyone research logistics as a massive priority. Particularly on a galaxy with lots of planets.

Personally I think getting resources is as if not more important than getting too many planets.

One thing that might work to limit an early massive land grab, is to make new colonies have an initially high per-turn development cost that goes down over time (perhaps as population increases). I remember seeing something like this in the venerable Spaceward Ho! 4X game, and it worked pretty well to limit over-expansion; if you expanded too quickly, the development costs could overwhelm your capacity to afford them and your colonies start to die.

With some balancing to make sure that it isn't *too* expensive to expand reasonably, this could work well in GC2, I think. If the colony dev cost was a user-selectable game parameter, players could vary things from just as they are now (if cost=0) to requiring highly strategic and selective colony expansion (if cost=very high) even in large galaxies with abundant habitable worlds.

I like the idea of reducing the landrush thing.

How about doing it similar to the starbase system, where each consecutive starbase gets more expensive to build? It wouldn't have to be linear either, so that the first colonies are comaratively cheap, but then they get painfully expensive.
If you link that to the size of the galaxy maybe, you could add this as more of a strategic decision.

Something the game Alpha Centauri did that was kind of nice was an "accelerated start". You pick that option, and everybody starts with empires that are similar in power and have about 50-100 turns of development. It was a way to skip the mad expansion rush and get on with the empire management and warfare. It also ensured that everyone had similar power at first (no one AI or player gobbling up the whole map and ending the game before it even started). Of course, I have no idea how much work that feature would take to add. There's probably also some issues involving the fact that the different AIs are designed to emphasize expansion to a different degree, but to be honest I'd be willing to sacrifice that diversity from time to time to be able to take a break from the the "ZOMG BUILD COLONIES!!!1" phase of the game.

Yes this would be a nice option from tme to time

An idea to stop the landrush is no colonising of planets if your treasuryis negitive

There are many ways to stop it but each has its own problems, anyway I find it slightly fun
And as Avatar Frogboy [Stardock] said

"Personally I think getting resources is as if not more important than getting too many planets. "

I have lost to the AI [one on one] when i had grabbed most of the planets but few resources

I just returned from another game. This whole aggressive expansionist approach is tiring me. It doesn't matter if I'm winning or losing, I can't play this approach for more than 20 minutes at most. I conquer a planet - take a break. I'm losing and can't break through the planet's defenses, I take a break. I really don't like it that much....

I would rather prefer to evolve my owned planets, build everything and enjoy a nice game, but unless I pick that huge diplomacy boost at the beginning of the game, I'm toast. You just CAN'T win if you're not expanding or conniving yourself to victory, no way. Eventually you'll be a someone's dinner, no matter your defenses. We need the builder or lone researcher approach to stand a chance as well, don't you agree?

I like colonization as it is.

If it hadn't been for those research bonuses, I would have been trashed. But I scraped an alliance victory through being a diplomat

Exactly. But like you said, diplomacy is the only real alternative to colony-rush and aggressive expansion. You can't out-tech anyone due to tech-trading, you can't buy anyone even if you have huge amounts of money if you don't have enough diplomacy skill, and the best influence in the universe won't save you when the fleets are coming. Small defensive tightly-managed fortresses won't help you, either. So it's all down to either might or diplomacy.

Fot those who find diplomacy and expansionnism is the only way to survive, you should try to play a trade heavy race. Get a lot of trade route and a good trade bonus and start trading like mad with the powerfull (at least one). If anyone attack you, theyll soon face your trading partner in the war, making you quite hard to kill. Chance are, your trade partner will become your ally and the alliance victory will become easy (who said you have to kill everybody yourself to win, just let your well financed allie do it themself). It a viable strategy (at least it was in galciv 1) and i`m sure it still is in galciv 2

Yeah, I did that, too. It didn't work. I was constantly stuck in the corner (for three straight games, weird), no one wanted to trade with me or take my bribes (I had a very good bonus to economics), and eventually, after the Arceans finished mopping everything, they went straight at me for no apparent reason. Bummer. Even my lucky-rangers backed up by a very potent military starbase didn't save me from their huge fleets. But thanks, I'll try it again, and restart until I'm in the center of the galaxy.

I personally snag every planet I can. I'll buy colony ships immediately to get one per turn and snag as many planets as possible. Then I worry about the finances later. Usually there will be enough taxes going to make up for it, so it works out.