Personally, I modded mine to cost 200 to 250.
Didn't touch size, though. Colony ships only becoming available with huge hulls would be a bit too late for my tastes.
Furthermore, you'd need to modify all the AI pre-designs so the computer will build colony ships at all.
Instead I gave the colony module a hefty negative supply modifier, so starting colony ships would have less than 1 sector range. And this change automatically carries to all future designs, even though it becomes irrelevant at some point.
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rezaf

"Second the whole "grab the planets" startgame is not that fun for me" Quote by Citizen pdifolco

I've only played a couple of games and for this is a huge flaw in the game. I'm building up while all the AI are just grabbing planets. It seems the only thing to do at the start is grab as many planets as you can quickly and forgot about anything else and it ruins the game for me.

1.1 fixes some of that for me, though I notice that the AI still does it to a degree and tends to be fairly good at it simply because it can really analyse the benefits.

One way to get around the whole colony rush thing is to limit the amount of stars and habitable worlds.

Troop modules need also a big increase - so it'll be actually costly to the attacker to invade planets. I also contemplate making them *much* smaller in capacity - stg like 100 instead of 500, with cost 100 or so (Adv troop module will be double values).

How do you propose to actually take a planet, under those conditions? I think the difficulty of taking a planet is about right at the moment. If you haven't invested any defences or ground combat techs and can't control your space, you deserve to lose the planet.

A game where planets are expensive to colonize but relatively easy to invade if left undefended would be a lot of fun.

pdifolco: I'm not at my gaming rig now ... just copy paste the relevant entry from any of the supply modules (I though it was named supply, but it might be range) and give it a sound negative modifier. I use -18 atm.

About colony modules: In some of my test games, a 250 cost has caused the AI to abandon building colony ships alltogether, which you don't want to happen - at least I didn't. So I usually use 200, which doesn't seem to have that effect. Again: in some games, 250 will work, but oddly not always.

About invasions: I also think it's balanced OK as it is. But nobody stops you from adjusting their cost in your games, anyway.

Another thing I'd recommend to stop the initial mass-colony-ships: Create a scenario file with the races you wanna play with chosen and use standard conditions otherwise (tech etc.). Then set starting funds to a really low value, I use 1000.
The AI has a tendency to buy anything if they can afford. With 1000 and increased cost for colony ships, you can't even rush-buy a single colony ship IIRC... Of course this affects the player also, but so it should be.
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rezaf

If planet populations grew in an even remotely sensible manner, this could actually work.
As it stands, even a fairly new colony with only a few developed (read occupied) tiles will have maxed out population.
Give it a few farms and a tad more time, and to occupy these worlds you'd need to call upon troopships 1024 to 6312...
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rezaf

I increased the Colony cost to 200. Helped out greatly.

"I third the whole "grab the planets" startgame is not that fun for me" Quote by Citizen pdifolco

Here is what I believe are the fundamental flaws in this game:

1) You start with limited fog of war - you know where stars are and how many planets there are per star (AI knows this as well). There is very limited exploration in the game.
2) You start with (for all intents and purposes) unlimited ship range - so you can instantly colonize vast expanses of the galaxy.
3) You start with far too much cash - enough to buy four or five colony ships, or several planetary improvements. You should maybe have enough starting cash to buy ONE ship or ONE improvement.
4) All colonizable planets can be colonized by all races (unlike MOO where planets had size AND type, and type dictated what tech or race was required to settle on the planet).
5) There are no research techs that allow you to colonize "grade 0" planets or create new planets - what you get at the beginning of the game is it.

So what's left? An all-out land grab for the first hour of the game that dictates the winner 90% of the time. The rest is just careful management of resources until your planetary superiority overwhelms your opponents.

The thing that made MOO so successful was the DEPTH of gameplay strategy, and that you could play the game over and over and use different races and different strategies and win the game in very different ways. GC2 is close, but needs some definite tweaking to get there. The whole early game aspect of "race to colonize planets regardless of your race, situation, or strategy" has to be reworked.

So... if I can figure out how to mod the above, I think we might have a fun game that comes much closer to the spirit of the original MOO series. Some of these mods (i.e. starting cash) should be easy to implement. Others (planet "type" and terraforming tech tree) will be harder.

I just introduced a few basic mods to see how things would shape up. I started with ship range and slashed it. I cut basic lifesupport froma 6 range to a 1, general life support from an 8 to a 2, etc. Now for the first time ships actually have to stay close to home until you get improved tech, and life support tech actually means something. The only way to expand early in the game is to leap-frog from system to system - if you hit a system without colonizable planets, you can't expand in that direction.

So that turned out well.

Next I slashed your first survey ship (the one you start the game with). It always bothered me that the ship had ion engines, sensors mk IV, and advanced life support - three valuable techs you won't research for quite some time. So the survey ship went back to hyperdrives, sensors mk 1, and basic lifesupport. For all intents and purposes it is now a slightly faster scout that can survey anomalies. (Much better for a slower game start - plus, it has the lower range introduced above).

I played a few start games with these basic changes, and the game was MUCH more interesting (for me at least). I had to do much more exploring.

Next step - reduce starting cash (once I can find it).

Well, my first mod efforts are going nicely - I've multiplied colony module cost by 5, Transports costs by 3, and capacity of each cut by 80% (only 100M, 200M for the Assault transport).
Also changed "conventional" war InvTactics to give a 20-30% advantage, 10-20% improvement destruction, and cost 50 bc (war is expensive - see Irak ?)
I also wanted to cut down ranges, but never figured what represents the "range" value of modules : are they sectors ? Squares ?

The FoW problem doesn't bother me much - sure we do know where the stars are, and I don't understand how you can know the number or type of planets without exploring ?
My other gripes are rather with the weapon tech tree and its innumerable marginal "discoveries" (I think we can cut down number of techs by a factor 3, keeping only "real" improvements), and the way defense work : I'd like to give Armor modules defense values vs Beams *and* Guns *and* missiles, Shields modules def vs beams *and* missiles, ECM vs missiles only !
So we'd have something working sensibly *and* useful defense systems.

Now I have to make a serious overhaul of all the weapons and defense techs & modules - my initial "very simple mod" is getting complicated ...

The FoW problem doesn't bother me much - sure we do know where the stars are, and I don't understand how you can know the number or type of planets without exploring ?

With a handy little thing like the hubble telescope, and some guys who have too much time observing stars and their wobbing, we have been able to locate many planets and estimate their size, mass, and atmosphere based upon factors such as how far they are from the sun, what type of star it is, etc. This is all happening right NOW, I'm sure in 300 years, we can tell if a planet is habitable or not.

My other gripes are rather with the weapon tech tree and its innumerable marginal "discoveries" (I think we can cut down number of techs by a factor 3, keeping only "real" improvements), and the way defense work : I'd like to give Armor modules defense values vs Beams *and* Guns *and* missiles, Shields modules def vs beams *and* missiles, ECM vs missiles only ! So we'd have something working sensibly *and* useful defense systems.

The unnumerable marginal discoveries prevents you from rushing at Doom Ray and Blackhole Erruptors really fast. It is designed specifically to slow down the pace of research up the weapon tree. If you cut these out, you would have to up the prices for the technologies, and thus... what would be the point? Would you rather have Plasma beams earlier, to get a quick jump ahead of your rivals, or would you want to wait 3 times as long to get the 'ultimate' plasma beam? I don't see how eliminating the steps will help.

And as much as I would like the ability to give multiple defenses and weapons, etc... I have to say that your idea just sounds insanely imbalanced, and not really all that sensible either. Why would shields not work against mass drivers, but does work against missiles (they are basically the same in their delivery methods), what would be the point of using ECMs (only stops missiles) or Missiles (stopped by everything) versus using all mass driver weapons (stopped by only armors). You have to keep in mind that the way defenses works now, armor works against all types of weapons, it just is ineffective against beams and missiles, and same for all the other defenses. This makes more 'sense' than your proposed changes, even if you did manage to somehow balance this nightmare.

I think you need to carefully think over what sort of game you want and why, pdifolco. You say reality has nothing to do how you want planet discovery to work, but then say you want defenses to be realistic. Definitely the closest thing to reality in the game is knowing where the planets and stars are, especially given the tech level the game assumes all the civilizations have.

Detecting planets and even what they are like should be pretty easy in a couple hundred years though. In fact we are very likely to start finding planets similar to Earth (at least in size and distance from the sun) in the next 20-30 years. Space-based astronomy using inferometer techniques could essentially filter out the light produced by a particular star so we can focus on the light reflected by planets. Right now the sheer brightness of stars is our main difficulty.

Once we can see the light planets are reflecting, we can examine the spectrum of light and that would indicate the presence of water and other molecules in the atmosphere.

As for galaxy size issues, I think we just have to accept that a game that really dealt with the billions of stars in an actual galaxy would probably be too difficult to play...certainly if it dealt with stars and planets on an individual level. It would have to divide things into clustures of resources (stars, planets, etc), and even those would need to be fairly large.