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.

[fieryspoon]

Also! do populations grow linearly? Maybe they shouldn't. They definitely don't grow linearly in real llife. Maybe there should be some kind of generation thing. Like, 16 hours, the population doubles. So it would take 5.8 days to grow it completely, but the strength of the colony would stay relatively low for a few days. The numbers would need to be balanced, obviously, but I would welcome a change where a new colony is something precious that would need to be protected for a little while. And maybe if you take over a struggling colony, it just kills the whole population and turns into an outpost, to prevent people from just being total vultures about it?