Exactly. Haven´t tried it yet, but from changelog it clearly seems as culling of tall strategies, which we SO MUCH wanted to introduce.

Sad...

GC3 is a really good game and I love that the developers take pride in it and are asking how to make it better.  I think you guys nailed a lot of the interface like the negotiation bar.  That makes it so much easier and faster to make a deal.

The typical trajectory of one of these games has multiple phases for me.

1. Novelty.  What are all these shiny new buttons/races/techs/ etc?!

2.  Exploration.  Increasing difficulty level playthoughs to explore the game mechanics.  Win, increase difficulty, win, increase difficulty.  I am the best!

3.  The wall.  Once I get to a high enough difficulty the computer stomps on me. 

4.  Research.  What in the heck is happening with food and cities?  What exactly does "+25% research" mean?

5.  Spreadsheet.  Build a spreadsheet to help illustrate the game mechanics for myself.

6. Victory!  Beat the snot out of the AI on harder difficulties with my new found understanding.

7.  Remorse.  Did I really beat the computer or did I just exploit the game mechanics?  What is the difference?  What is the meaning of life?  Why am I playing this game? 

8.  Sabbatical.  Until the next game is released.

If you can eliminate the spreadsheet step then the game will be better for me.  It becomes unfulfilling when there is a complex interaction between multiple components which only acts as a trap for a casual player or the AI.  If there is one optimal choice in almost every instance then why provide a choice?

The example of population and improvements to production has been discussed at length.  Production is simply too complicated.  In vanilla gc3 to calculate hammers you need to know your (raw production+bonuses) * (raw multipliers) * (wheel split) * (cumulative of racial, planetary, improvements, and adjacency multipliers).  No matter how you tweak that system you will end up with a numerically superior choice which may not be intuitive to the player.  My desire is to abandon the multi-step multipliers.

Simplify the system and simplify the bonus/multipliers.  Make it clear what the choices are so the player is acting strategically on a high level.  Maybe divorce population from social/military construction and make population fundamental to research/income.  A player could build a smog-filled industrial world with minimal population and have specialty planets dedicated to finance/trade/tourism and research filled with people.  That forces a choice that is clear for the player, research or production with lasting repercussions.  The lore can even account for this because the Drengin would just have a slave pit world and the terrans would have a robotic factory world.  Citizens invent and make money. 

I would prefer not to have hardcaps on things.  Morale is a softcap on population if the penalties are harsh enough.  This would force the higher population planets to be higher class because there will be more required infrastructure to house, feed, and satisfy the population. That seems intuitive to me. 

My only other complaint is that there is no effective defense or zone of control.  I can't bottleneck my opponent or control the terrain at all.  Why isn't my military starbase a space castle that the opposing fleet must neutralize instead of flying straight by?  Why can't my planet install defensive weaponry that could bombard an orbiting or passing fleet?  When I completely control a solar system why can anyone just fly straight through?  Why have I mastered interstellar travel but I can't put a ginormous railgun on the moon?

Streamline and clarify the mechanics then we the players get to appreciate the quality of the AI without the obstacle/crutch of the planetary production confusion.

Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space. - Doug Adams

Space is mind-bogglingly boring, too, lioneljoe.  And any traveller therein prays that it stays that way. 

There are not currently borders, merely lines that show your influence.

Personally I'm pro-borders existing, and being much tighter and separate than influence.

The immediate area around planets and starbases should be borders... anything else is influence only. This could even leave great gaps in your territory, that the other players can fly through, but if they get REALLY close to your planets or starbases it could be a big no-no and treaty violations.

Realistically, in order to have Tall worlds, several things have to change to keep stuff in balance:

1. Raw production CANNOT be linear with population. It's just way too gamebreaking to do so. We've discussed several ways to fix this current 1:1 ratio, and while I don't have a total solution, I've tested one on my own that seems to balance considerably better.

Raw Production = .5 * (pop)^1.1

2. Improvements (wealth/production/research) have to have low, fixed values (i.e. +.5, +.75, +1, etc.) for the basic bonus, and modest % per level (e.g. +5% per level).

3. Approval has to be changed to a penalty system.  You get 100% production at 100% approval. Any approval level below that reduces production. For example, use a linear step function, so for every full 5% below 100%, you lose 5% of full production. So a 43% approval rate gives a -55% penalty.  To go with this, approval sources have to be more plentiful - e.g. bring back the starbase approval modules, but don't let them stack as high as planetary ones, and remove the resource requirements for "ordinary" (i.e. more than 1-per-planet) planetary approval improvements. It really has to be possible to have a 40+ population planet with 75%+ approval, and, with a bit of work, a 100% happy 30 pop planet.

What the above does is this: to get a Tall planet, you build mostly cities and approval buildings. This gives you very balanced values (i.e. similar adjusted wealth/research/production), but still sticking below a pure 1:1 pop:production ceiling, so a Tall planet isn't some incredible powerhouse, but rather a general "everything" planet. So, for a planet with 30 pop, you're looking at about 21 raw population, which means 21 production, 21 research, and 21 wealth.

For Wide empires, individual raw production for <10 pop planets is severely sub 1:1, and more like 1:2. There, you need to fill the planet with specialized buildings to get decent values, and you'll only ever get those for one category. So, presume a class-10 planet with 8 factories and 5 population, that would be 3 raw production, with maybe +4 and +100% in production bonuses, yielding a production of  14, but a research of 3 and wealth of 3.

In short, to support the difference between Wide and Tall, you need a population:raw ratio that yields more benefits per 1 of pop at high population levels than at low levels, AND you need individual improvements to provide substantial, but not overwhelming, bonuses.  The goal is for Tall empires to consist of generalized worlds, and Wide ones of specialized worlds, with you needing somewhere around 3 Wide planets to equal one Tall planet in the sum total of output across each category.

This is what I was saying, this is how Galactic Civilizations II worked and that way there is no hard cap, just a soft cap based on number of entertainment buildings/farms/cities one can build.  Why not?

I think a linear population to production, 1 to 1 model, is the way to go, personally. It is simple and intuitive. Everything else can be balanced around that. 

Making negative approval more penalizing is a nice idea, but would mostly limit tall empires, which are already basically non existent in this game. As others have pointed out, tall empires will lack necessary resources as well. 

Let's face it: in Galactic Civ, there really is no such thing as a successful tall empire. There are just too many obstacles. For example, one way to increase your economic output without adding more planets is to simply grow your population, but good luck trying to do that if you have no monsantum. There should be some way around these obstacles, for example, higher level farming techs provide both an enhanced farm (that requires monsantum) and one that does not. 

Another way to boost tall empires is to simply provide more specialized buildings, those one-per-player buildings such as the manufacturing capital or research capital, or buff these buildings. Personally, I'd like to see some kind of one-per-player building that provides extra tiles. This way you could have at least one very high class planet in your empire.

Or more if you shuttle people around using colony ships.

I heard a lot of talk here about tall vs wide empires. Why verses? Why not have both? I happen to like the colony rush. I like winning it and I like making the most of my spoils.

Something that I don't like is all the work needed to manage everything. This game has more micromanagement than GC 2 had. Things were also more smooth.

I like resources, but I also don't want them used for anything but "special" purposes.  That is, you should be able to build a competitive Civ WITHOUT any resources at all.  What resources should do it provide a modest edge - so in a battle between two Civs of the same level, the one with resources should win. But access to resources won't counter an opponent who is substantially more advanced than you.  Note that I don't count Food as a resource - that's a completely separate dynamic.

Which is why I like resources to be required only for the following:

1. Weapons and Defenses, where every couple of tech advances there is a "special" weapon/defense requiring resources, that gives maybe a 25% improvement in performance.  Here, that would mean that having the resource could allow you to compete evenly with someone who had a 1 tech level advantage over you in that weapon/defense.

2. Special Unique buildings - the one-per-Empire or one-per Galaxy should definitely continue to require resources. That forces people to be selective about which of these they try to obtain, rather than a generic "rush-for-the-specials".

3. The high-end one-per-planet improvements; you should be able to build at least the first set of these freely, but afterwards, getting a resource would be necessary. 

4. The very high-level Starbase modules, though I'd want them to have at least the first 3 or so in the series not to require resources.

But I am not in favor of any normal building (e.g. one where you can build more than one on a planet) EVER requiring a resource, regardless of how high-tech.

If we're using this model, I'm in favor of reducing the availability of space-based resources significantly - dial it back at least 50% from the current settings

An individual Civ can either be Wide or Tall at a point in time - not both, by definition. As your empire increases in side, naturally, not all worlds are equal, but we're talking about an average - when surveying your worlds, do they generally have lots of big population, or are they filled with lots of specialized buildings.  What we want is to have the game competitive for both choices, so if you chose Wide, you can be competitive with both Wide and Tall opponents, and vice versa. And, of course, you can alter your strategy as time goes by, so you don't always have to be one or the other.  In theory, it would be possible to chose the middle ground, but it's far, far, far harder to balance for 3 possible world planning strategies than it is for just 2, because then you're into the scenarios of (say):  We've balanced 5 Cities vs 5 Factories, but can we do it for 3 Cities + 2 Factories vs 5 Factories, or 3 Cities + 2 Factories vs 1 City + 4 Factories? Balance issue are very difficult, and while there will be some variation due to optimal tile layout (and bonus tiles), generically balancing everything should mean that a pure City or pure Factory route is significantly more optimal than any combination one.

I posted heavily on this in another thread, but I really think trade resources should be manufactured, or grown by the civ..not found by luck...

Resources put an artificial break on progress...  rather than a balanced systematic break...

Monsantium or Duranium availability is the biggest break on large populations...    Morale should be the break....   building too big too fast should cause revolts... which may destroy buildings... lost production..

These are mechanics that Civ has had....    it is a mechanic that is easy to understand and hard to exploit...

Do that.

If population growth was by civilization, not planets that would go a long way to help tall empires. If single planets had no population caps. Where lets say if you build, or buy a colony ship then starvation is incorperated based on normal rules. 

You could incorperate no limit on terriformed tiles is you have only one planet. This would go a long way towards tall. You could make the ai more willing to trade rare resources to single planet planet empires, because they are to small to worry about. I prefer a complex resource system it is more fun. I wouldnt mind bringing back trade goods.