There is another thread about influence upkeep, focused on a proposal about weighting influence upkeep with galaxy size, which is not well received by some devs because it implies varying influence costs depending on galaxy settings, which in turn means that the optimal time to set a new colony to influence focus (to compensate for increasing infuence costs) would vary depending on galaxy size.Vezzra wrote: ↑Thu Oct 29, 2020 1:56 pmWe reached agreement to try the following, and see how that is going to work:Issue: current influence upkeep equation does not grow faster than number of colonies or population, and so defeats it's exponential-growth control purpose. Is any developer planning to introduce distance-based influence upkeep (either as the default upkeep, my preferred choice, or as one that can be adopted via policies, as long as the default upkeep is something different from current one).
At the start of the game, IP costs are just based on number of colonies. The formula should be exponential, but scale in a way so that the first few colonies have only moderate IP costs, but after that IP costs should ramp up quite drastically. To address this, the player needs to adopt one of several policies which alter the way IP costs are calculated.
One of these policies could be distance-based (with higher costs for colonies which are not supply connected), maybe two number-based (one better for supply connected empires, one better for distributed supply disconnected empires) etc. All these policies will offer significantly better IP costs. The player would choose policies depending on their situation/intended strategy etc.
The starting formula might be something like this: (# of colonies ^2) * 0.2.
The policies for colony IP costs need to be unlocked by comparatively cheap, early game techs, so players can get them before the default IP costs formula cripples their empire.
I don't think that is a problem at all, but we'll be better off if we can get other influence upkeep equations that tackle the same problems (scalable to any galaxy size, hampering snowballing) without presenting that unwanted characteristic of varying influence costs.
So, let's discuss.