What is "large empire penalty"

Basically a way to try and limit how fast you can expand by slapping you with an unhappiness penalty.  There is a trait that custom factions can take that eliminates that, which is helpful if you are going to go crazy.  Cant imagine how bad it would be on a huge huge map...but if you are getting -6 for 6 planets...yikes!!  Never have liked stuff like this anyway.  Why the heck would anyone be upset about more joining your culture...would we be ticked off here in the States if someone wanted to be number 51?  I dunno...but they may need to tweak this some.  You see things like this in many games to limit your growth or slow it down til you get better happiness techs.

The devs already said that it will be tweaked. That said, morale/happiness is almost a non factor right now as it only effects how your planet fights or how your influence grows. Both of which can be heavily influenced by other things.

Notice that it's a PERCENTAGE adjustment penalty, not a BASE penalty.

So, a -20 penalty for having 20 planets can be offset by having one basic morale building on each planet. It shouldn't need to be tweaked too much, except maybe to be slightly less than directly linear. Maybe the 2/3rds root or something like that. At that level, 100 planets would be -20.

It's only really an issue in the larger Galaxy sizes, in the smaller ones 1% per planet is pretty small and as has been said can easily be countered. All they reall need to do is add a scaling factor that reduces the per planet penalty as the Galaxy size is increased, since in bigger galaxies you expect empires to be bigger.

On Excessive and larger maps and on 'Uncommon' or more habitability it is normal to have empires on all sides with 90+ planets up to 300 or more.

Yes hence my suggestion for a scaling factor based upon Galaxy Size, e.g. morale penalty for large empires becomes;

Morale Penalty = (NumberOfPlanetsOwned*scaling factor)

The scaling factor would be at it's max 1 on small maps and get progressively smaller as map size gets larger.

I believe what it's supposed to represent is the loss of cohesion in society as your empire gets larger, which is fine but on the bigger map size you need to scale the impact per planet down since you expect empires to be considerably bigger.

The exact scaling factor to use for different map sizes would need balancing. 

I don't like the idea of a morale penalty for having a large empire.  I know its common in 4x games now but I've always hated the idea itself.  Why do we need a global morale penalty for empire size?  Couldn't empire scaling limitation be done through growth rate or economically?  If I remember correctly GalCiv 2 did it economically, maintenance was enough that if you expanded to quickly without working on economy you didn't have much money left which hurt but wasn't crippling.  

I think any morale penalty for large empires is poor design at best and developers forcing players into their ideas of how to play the game a worst.  Its just a bad idea, leave it out of GalCiv.

I don't really agree that it's a bad design in itself, having a widely scattered population spread across lots of star systems, it would lead to a loss of social cohesion and respect for  central government, (unless your species had very different psychology from ours and they have an attribute for that). But hey we all have different opinions on these things.....it's just yours is clearly wrong  .

Seriously though some people will support this mechanic, some will hate it, but assuming they keep it I think it does need re-balancing on larger maps, which is why I make the suggestion.

happiness isn't an issue, everything is comfortably  in the green  if not 100%..  I just found it a little disconcerting that I was getting a penalty with 6 planets 90ish turns in & figured I'd find out if it was influenced by something  I could control other than simply not colonizing more.  from the replies, it looks like there is nothing to be done different and it's already been noted by the folks at SD

If anything this mechanic should be a based on the distance from your empire capital planet.

Structures such as manufacturing capitals and research capitals could (if built on any other planet than your homeworld) mitigate this penalty.

It could then be an additive to influence, both positive and negative, bepending on the situation.

Personally I dont think its a bad idea, it means you have to consider a little more carefully about the planets you are colonising/invading and then 'nurse' them a bit more than the normal procedure of 'Upgrade those 3 buildings and terraform that tile and build a Solar Power Plant between these 2 factories' and forget about it for 30 turns.

The main problem will be folks going for conquest victories on Abundant/Abundant/Abundant/Insane maps.  A -2000% penalty ain't no joke.  But since the devs have already said that they are looking into tweaking this (especially because of AAAI maps), I'm not that worried.

The one thing I would suggest, however, is introducing more sources of percentage based adjustments.  Pesonally, I would change the Harmony Crystals to 5% bonus instead of a flat 1.  It makes it inline with almost all of the other trade resources (except for the one concerning food, IIRC), and it would encourage people to "visit" the planets that had Harmony Crystals on them first when war breaks out.  Or at least make it a priority.

Even without tweaking Harmony Crystals, there really should be more percentage based things when it comes to morale in the game besides the Approval Relics and a couple of techs.  Mix things up a little, I say. Keeps things fresh and interesting.

When your talking distances on galactic scales anything outside your home system is very, very far. 

I would like a change where we research, 'Regional Capitals' which decrease unrest within a set sphere. As you go up the Government tree of your choice  you would get access to more of these. 

Such buildings can have a set value of happiness influence which can be modified by adjacency bonuses on the planet you build it on. This would be a cross mechanic, you are managing your unrest/happiness as well as having to determine which placement would get the precious 'regional capital' to influence the most planets you can.

This idea is of course stolen from Distant Worlds, I just happen to think it makes sense both in that game and here. 

I also like this idea, it reminds of Sins of a Solar Empire and how loyalty degraded with distance, but local culture centers boosted this.

Why would people be upset with more and more citizens? Well a few possible reasons? In a highly educated democracy, every citizen added deludes your relative power. If I live in ancient Athens and vote, my vote is 1/20,000 in the US today theoretically my vote is 1/320,000,000 its effective weight of power is heavily diluted if I cared to think about it.

Not all the empires are democracies, and a much more natural reason, is simply that people are limited in the scope of how big a thing they can believe in, they may lose faith that their needs are really represented and cared for in such a large empire. Depending on the communication technology, cultural diversification becomes a real thing, and a lack of cohesion and civil war may result.

Just a couple of ideas. In general, the GalCiv universe has instant communication and very good travel times, such that, I agree its pretty unlikely for a morale penalty to occur just because the empire got bigger, maybe the assumption is, that every new planet is a economic drag on everyone else for a period of time. If the empire penalty eases up with time, I think that'd be very balanced. Especially if the large empire penalty was, well, large.

I think that there should be an "influence potential" generated by each planet and starbase calculated by the formula a/(1+(x/b )^2), where a would be the influence produced and b would be a scale factor that could increase with technology and buildings, with X the distance between a planet and a given point on the map. Based on its level at a particular planet, the total influence field generated by all planets in your empire would give a bonus to approval on that planet, not large enough to drown out completely the effects associated with increased population but nevertheless substantial. Additionally, the influence potential should be the means of calculating influence spread throughout the galaxy, which shouldn't be too difficult to implement by release.

By implementing this feature, it would be possible to restrict over-expansion by conquest and colony rush, without forcing players to accept the linear "large empire penalty". Furthermore, the influence potential concept would consider not only distance from the civilization capital, but from all other planets in the civilization, giving other important and populous but nevertheless non-capital worlds importance in approval.

Playing on a gigantic map its damned near impossible for me to keep people happy.

I'm influence flipping planets right and left and now everyone is pissed.

My best planet has a high level approval building and is surrounded by four Starbases all of them with every approval module up through Zero G Balet and the bastards are still apathetic.

As it is influence is way overpowered and happiness is way too hard to keep up, I don't want to have to dedicate half my damned planets tiles to approval bonuses.

In that case we should give a significant nerf to influence. Planet approval should start at a low base level and rise with the total influence potential, being unaffected by the large empire penalty as we know it. This would reduce massively the investment in approval that players have to make, provided that they don't overextend.

Agreed