The planet defenses.

[fieryspoon]

I feel like colonies scale up in strength too quickly. You get to 400 Mu population pretty much immediately, in the scope of the timeline of a game. It takes so long to produce ships and move them, that a colony will almost certainly be able to defend against any number of units at the early stage of a game. If someone lands a colony ship nearby, there's basically no way to get rid of it until much, much later. I feel like colony populations should grow slower and the defense strength should not be linear, to allow for early game technology to take out low population colonies. I feel like the reward to risk ratio of sending out a colony ship is pretty out of wack at the moment. I'm fine with a full population colony being able to defend itself against lots of stuff, but it's just way too easy to get to a point where the time, resource, and strategic investment required to pose a threat to that colony is really unreasonable.

By a nonlinear growth, I mean that it should basically stay at a 1Mu defense level until about 150Mu, then grow on a really strong power curve up to its current level. Like raise it to the 6th power and let it grow from there. I also think that populations should grow at a rate that is about 20% of what it is now. It should be a much bigger deal to grow a colony to full size. That would also make the population growth science projects worthwhile.