Probably my biggest unresolved issue with the game right now, and the main reason I'm not playing much, is how poorly the economy scales up. While I am no great player and hardly an expert when it comes to the underlying math, it strikes me that wide empires are favoured overwhelmingly over tall, the result being massive colony spam, especially on larger maps and longer games. Since the much ridiculed LEP is gone as of 1.5 my sense is that the problem is even worse.

Before 1.5 arrived I had thought there was going to be some sort of new mechanic introduced that would replace the LEP and do a better job of what it was intended to do, such as scaling administrative costs, but that doesn't appear to have happened. While this was briefly discussed in the recent eXplorminate interview, it isn't clear to me how long we'll have to wait for the change.... And since Frogboy has said that the entire economic system of GalCiv3 will be redone in the expandalone, I am afraid it could mean that there won't be any significant changes in the meantime.

Could someone from SD please comment?