Playing defensively?

[Desdinova]

i prefer playing defensively. populate as much as you can in your home system. create ships and leave them on your side of the warp points this way any incoming ship is in close range and you as the defender get to atk first. i build bases at the warp points also. then expand system by system. following that same pattern. this works against the ai but i dont think it would work as well against a human. i noticed the ai doesnt use the create wormhole devices so i have not had to keep fleets in systems i controlled.

[oleg]

SEIV game design follows standard 4X concept: more resource producing sites you have - more stronger you are. There is almost no intrinsic brakes to make the overexpansion a disadvantage (mega evil empire is one). This is the same problem as in Civ, Moo, etc. Some game disigners, tried to fix it by putting production penalties, like in Civ3.
In this respect I especially like Proportions mod that make you more focused on developing few key colonies rather than grabbing as much free estate as possible.