I don't know how you judge kludges, but this seems pretty natural and straight-forward to me. Not only does it mesh well with reality, but all decent 4X games that i am aware of have some sort of mechanic along these lines, weather it be unhappiness, HFOG, interest, inefficiency, etc. They weren't all especially fun when considered in isolation, but consider the very real possibility that without these mechanism the game as a whole would have been worse.Bigjoe5 wrote:I'm starting to get very uneasy about this new "penalize the player for doing well" vibe that's been flying around lately... If we want having a small empire to be a valid option - which we do - then there are ways of introducing liabilities to large empires without the ugly kludge of a (more or less) direct penalty.eleazar wrote:- Citizen is part of a large empire (some increasing penalty as imperial population increases)
For example, I'm all for large empires being more vulnerable to espionage than smaller empires, but I'd prefer not to do that via a straight-up penalty to happiness for larger empires, which I think would just feel unfair and frustrating.
You need something significant to counteract the natural snowballing effect of a small early advantage. Not something that totally neutralizes the advantage of being bigger, but something that decreases the powerful cascade of winning a battle, thus capturing a planet and thus earning more PP, and thus being able to build more ships...