Feature Tweaks to Improve Play Balance

[gamer]

Here are some thoughts/suggestions I have after playing:

Games tend to be one sided once one player has sufficient production capacity, so the player that
grabs the most planets the fastest will almost always win by a landslide.

One tweak to balance this is to cap the production limit on each planet, to something like 3x
the turn production.  Once a planet has at least that many ships it does not produce any more
until those ships move away.  This might be worked around by always keeping one's ships in
motion, but at least that leaves an opening for an enemy fleet to jump in and take over a
planet.

Another similar tweak is to modify the production rate of a given planet based on the total
number of planets a player controls.  The idea is that larger empires are less efficient.  The
closer to 100% of the universe that a player controls the less each planet they control
produces, maybe on a non-linear scale with an absolute minimum of 1.

These two tweaks would have to be play tested to ensure they don't cause stalemates,
but once the levels are adjusted the game play will be more balanced with a larger sweet
spot for anyone to win.