Thanks.

Also, here's a tl:dr: distance should matter in GalcivIII. The effectivity of ships, starbases and planets in a number of area should be determined by their distance relatively to your empire.

I imagine that Stardock learned a lot from how Sins dealt with increasing fleet sizes and distances from the capital world.

This has been done a lot of different ways in different games. I'm not sure I like reducing the units effectiveness, as it has a side effect of lowering the effectiveness of a deep strike tactic (sneak some guys deep into someones territory with cloaking and take a world where they can't react to it). Making my ships slower and weaker makes it harder to do that.

If it's not going to go fine grained enough to track things like ammo or feul, maybe it should be a more straightforward damage per time effect. If I'm outside of my supply range, I can't get supplies to do things like replace or repair routine damage to my ships, and they start to break down. That imposes an effective time limit without resupply (aka: being in my logistics range) after which my ships don't really function.

I got HoI this week and I love it.

I just quite my game with Japan, I accumulated too many mistakes; I started playing the game like it was Risk or Axis and Allies and got screwed. The learning curve of this game is brutal, but I love it.

SoaSE gave you a percentile penalty to your entire empire's income each time you increased your fleet cap. So while you maintained the minimum fleet cap, your economy provided you with 100% of its earnings. At the next level of fleet cap, the economy provided you with, say, 90% of its earnings, and each subsequent increase in the fleet cap increased the penalty. Note that the economic cost was not related to current fleet size, only to the current fleet cap, and if I recall correctly ships in SoaSE did not have an upkeep cost.

Distance from the home world in SoaSE governed the maximum loyalty of a system; a system with 25% loyalty only sent you 25% of its resources and tax income, while a system with 50% loyalty sent you 50% of the same, and a system with 125% loyalty gave you 125%. The way it worked out was basically that you had the homeworld at ~125% loyalty, the worlds adjacent to it at ~100% loyalty, then the next 'ring' of worlds at ~90% loyalty, then the ring beyond that at ~75% loyalty, and then everything else was at 25% loyalty (note that I'm not positive on these numbers, and there might be one more step in there somewhere). You benefited somewhat from having a larger empire, but the thing that really carried your economy was your core worlds unless you just had an enormous empire.

The combination of these two mechanics basically meant that you didn't really gain anything from expanding your empire beyond a certain point, because firstly the fleet cap is a hard cap on the total number of ships you can have, and does not depend on empire size or map size and so it becomes increasingly difficult to properly defend an empire the larger it becomes, and secondly having a high fleet cap means that the lower loyalty worlds (which are all of them, once you go much beyond your homeworld) provide you basically nothing, because they have at least a 75% income penalty which multiplies the fleet cap related penalty, which essentially means that those fringe worlds are providing you maybe 10% of their potential income when your core worlds are each providing four or more times as much. And while you could provide static defenses to assist in holding the fringe regions, static defenses were seriously outclassed by a halfway decent fleet in the hands of even a moderately incompetent player (though Entrenchment helped static defenses out by bringing in starbases, which aside from usually being immobile are roughly equivalent to a small fleet in terms of firepower, though it also brought in some anti-starbase designs which can kill a starbase from beyond the starbase's range, and starbases are expensive to build and even more expensive to upgrade to a decent level). Rebellion made it worse because it gave everyone a one-of-a-kind superunit which 1. essentially makes a fleet unkillable unless opposed by another Titan-supported fleet and 2. is terribly slow and therefore not particularly easy to use as a response force. Which basically meant that if someone's running around on one side of your empire with a Titan and supporting fleet while your Titan and supporting fleet is on the other side of your empire, you might as well write off that side of your empire and just go mess up your opponent's empire instead, because you aren't going to get your fleet over there in time to effectively deal with the problem if you've got a large empire, big fleet battles are rather expensive regardless of who wins, unless one side is outplayed, and it's still only really the core worlds that matter, income-wise.