For the longest time, my go-to strategy was to not worry about farms and population, but to just build other buildings and let population take care of itself. Not building farms means not building entertainment complexes because overpopulation doesn't happen, which frees up multiple tiles for other improvements. Typically, I do not find it a handicap to have a lower population, because the bonuses from all the improvements add up. You can win this way. 

That said, I am working on a different strategy now that emphasizes population growth more, to see if it works any better. We will see.

One way to look at it is this: population is the only thing that becomes less efficient the more that you have. Adding another factory or market or lab always adds the same bonus, but the benefit of additional population diminishes as you go above 10.

I find population to be the key factor in developing an economy.  Population is your primary source of raw production.  If you have more production then you have a bigger economy.  Return on investment considerations are less important than chokepoint considerations. Population, especially population growth, is the hardest limit put into the game.  It controls everything else.

On any planet with Class 10 or better, I put 3 Farms and a Hospital in some sort of quad.  I keep an eye on my population and the cap.  When the population approaches the cap, I go for the next farm tech.  And I always have the latest available Hospital tech for the age.  I use two tiles for Approval, but with proper management, I can get one of those back in the late game.  It can be yet another factory, lab, market, whatever.  Or sometimes, another farm.

One of the true paths to power is to order people to do what they were going to do anyway.  I tell my people to breed.

As a consequence, my population graph steadily climbs above  all the others.  As it does so, my production graph follows a similar curve, magnified by the jumps you can see for the Governance techs.  If you get enough production advantage, you will find you have an advantage in everything else.

I see the GalCiv economy as a giant feedback loop, with population growth rate per planet being the controlling choke point in the loop.  In my head I see it like this:

Planets ==> People ==> Production ==> Power ==> Planets

If this is accurate, then one of the things that a Tall empire needs is not just a higher population cap, but a higher population growth rate, or it will not be able to keep up in raw production with Wide empires.

erischild is right on the money.  

My two cents on tall vs wide:

The weird non-linear pop growth is by far the biggest factor against tall empires right now.  Spreading out magnifies your pop growth in a patently rediculous fashion -- excepting the Yor,  who really do 'suffer' from linear pop growth,  in that a small,  low pop world will take forever to make more Yor (trust me,  this is a major PITA to playing the Yor vs any other race).

Two other things would help tall empires:

* recalculate science contributions:  make big science centers count for more.   A races's biggest planet contributes 100%.  Next one contributes 90%.   Next one 80%.  etc down to some floor (TBD,  maybe 20 or 30%).   You could justify this easily by saying that there is a certain amount of duplication of effort between planets,  and that only the biggest science planets can afford the biggest and most interesting toys^H^H^H lab equipment.

* make planets, as well as starbases, require Administration (wait!  don't shoot!  arrghhh!!  not the spleen again!!)

I've enjoyed reading through these ideas.

Nonlinear population growth makes sense, and I think it would go a long way to improving the tall vs. wide dynamic.

I don't think this is a bad idea, given some other changes. If this were implemented, the base administrator number would need to be higher (obviously), but perhaps there could also be a capstone-like tech that provides administrators. I don't know that the current capstone tech dynamic allows for cumulative change, but I envision something like a mid-level capstone tech that can be researched as many times as desired adding a single administrator at a time. So, if a player wants another planet and there aren't any more administrators, some time/resources would have to be diverted in order to pursue additional expansion.

The discussion about recalculating science contributions brings to my mind an alternative possibility--perhaps certain specialized buildings (research or otherwise) could have a minimum planet population requirement. In the long run, this would even out as each faction grew... but an early focus on building a smaller number of planets while pursuing large-population improvements could give tall civs an early boost that wide civs wouldn't enjoy. If such a population-requirement were added to specialized improvements, then sending out colonists to expand could temporarily shut the improvement down or diminish its effectiveness...

One other thing that strikes me as odd in Gal Civ III is how easy it is never to have a budget deficit. Sure, production and research may have to slow down, but I can expand without any worry of overextending my resources. As already mentioned in this thread, the mechanics of Gal Civ II prevented excessive early-game expansion--and I think that's not such a bad thing.

And we don't yet know what the upcoming expansion will do to overhaul the game's system of economics.

But I think more strongly tying population to economic production in some way would be helpful. I'm not sure of all the dynamics involved in implementing this, but generally speaking, at small population levels (e.g., below 5), I think planets should be more of a liability rather than an asset.

If I understand the preview of 2.0 we will get a new resource called administrators and you need one for your starbase.

So one way administrators might work is to force you making a choice between expansion or strong worlds, if you need administrators to colonize a world. Also they seem to have changed the distance between spacestations again making it possible to spam stations around worlds even more.

But this is my speculation based on the preview.

 

I think I'd just prefer both to require one.  It's easier to grok conceptually,  doesn't require any extra player interaction,  takes time to set up (gotta actually build those starbases and modules),  and can be shot down.    I especially want that last bit.

Yeah,  pretty much any sensible method of diminishing returns would be agreeable,  as long as new planets don't cause "net negative" effect - it would really grind my gears if colonizing Planet Crap in the Useless Nebula somehow made all my scientists on Planet Science the Wonderful forget how to do their jobs.  

I *am* perfectly happy with the concept of the poor scientists on Planet Crap trying to figure out what research they're going to do with their 5 dollar science budget that Planet Science the Wonderful aren't already doing,  and doing better -- so their overall contribution will be far less than even their miniscule budget would suggest.