I was doing some scanning and purging today and I thought, these really small planets might actually be worthwhile if they didn't take up as much space as the big ones. What if for one planet slot you could have one Very Large or two Smalls, or something like that? A smaller colony must be easier to maintain and administer than a big one, so why can't it count less towards our planet limit? Then so many more planets would become worthwhile to build colonies on! There wouldn't be so many useless rocks out there!

Perhaps it could work like this: Every level you can support X more planet space (as in a Very Large has 57 space and a Small has 39). You can only add more planets up to your total limit - so the above Very Large would count 57 space towards your total, and the Small only 39. So it would act a lot like it currently does, except instead of every planet being worth 1 point each would be worth how much space they have to build, and your capacity would be calculated based on this rather than 1 planet per 4 ranks.

Great idea tiny flaw.

Dan makes money from people buying quasi's. With this in place fewer quasi's would be bought meaning less funds for dan.

Quasis will still be valuable. They'll be needed to expand the size of your rich, highly improved planets where the real estate is expensive, at the cost of only a small amount of cheap real estate somewhere else that you haven't invested anything into. Each quasi would cost you less than a fourth of the tiniest planets around.

Of course, we could also alter the formula somewhat so that the building space to planet space is not 1 to 1, but that would be more complicated. Or possibly that only the planet's native size counts towards your limit, so quasis give you more room for free. I'll let Dan figure it out.

And of course you'll still need the quasis for your dyson and rift missions. No obviating that need!

Edit: Where does one use quasis anyway? Not on the run of the mill unoccupied planet you found lying around; lucky if it even reaches Extremely Rich. No, you use them on the x16 Mega Rich Toxics you're about to turn into Colossal Irradiateds. Right up until somebody conquers your planet, anyway.

no thanks

this would make moons (+10% or +20% extra size) realy bad, compaired to rings or ruins

I figured moons wouldn't affect it, since it's a % bonus. What would count for planet limit would be the base size before the bonus.

Of course, Dan might figure out a different formula than the one I proposed. It's just one possible implementation of a rough idea.

Here's another possible implementation. For every level you get X more points of support points. Each colony counts as 3 (or some other number) plus the size class, starting at 1 for Very Tiny. Numbers may be different. That way, it's still beneficial to get bigger planets, as you have to pay fewer of the 3 point per colony overhead, but you won't be penalized so heavily for the small ones.

What happens if you have 6/7 Small Planets and are capped out on planet slots? Wouldn't that be abuseable if you could just make 'em bigger with Quasis?

If you want to spend a bunch of money to get a minor advantage that disappears as soon as you level up, go for it. The only people I can see this giving any more than an infinitesimal advantage to would be the people who spend months/years below rank 50.

I'd even be up for invasions being allowed to go over the cap. The real issue would still be the cost of invasions so the costs would need to be lowered across the board (or even put in an exponential curve based on sizes) to make smaller ones worth taking.