Just change to a one-off design and then delete that design. Takes a year to do it, so we have to be more specific with the rule wording:

"You may not have more than X orbitals built at any time. If you begin any year with more than X orbitals, you must delete orbital designs until you have X or fewer orbitals remaining."

That allows you the following scenario:
Year 0: You have X orbitals and are on the warpath. You give your attack fleet orders to conquer Nivenyrral.
Year 1: Attack succeeded. You now own Nivenyrral. Queue a "Big Phat Starbase" on Nivenyrral. Create a new "Teeny Little Fort" design, and queue one on Pegasus (which already has an orbital).
Year 2: You start the turn with X+1 orbitals. Delete the Teeny Little Fort design. You now have X orbitals.


If you forget to perform a downgrade in year 1, you are left with a potentially painful situation in year 2. You will have to delete a design. Hopefully you have a design that only 1 or 2 planets have. Otherwise...ouch.

Except it is a very limited hab empty planet (25%) - and far easier to kill than planets of other PRTs.

I was thinking that "only X orbitals may have an orbital device, and only those orbitals may build ships".

I should probably say that I have an automated host backup and message pane scraper in place that could help verify this limitation fairly easily (a small amount of work would let it check for orbitals with an "orbital" device, and compare with the "ships built" list. This could kind of be undermined by exploiting the SB build bug (i.e. build 99% of a whole pile of ships at a station (without completing any) and then move production there and complete them all in one year. But the scraper also pulls build queues, so even that could be easily checked (nothing but a new SB hull, TF or alchemy (lol) should ever be in an AR queue).


The AR would therefore be allowed to build "defenses" (ineffective as they may be) on their planets, as well as actually using their full size.

Actually, yes, this might be the way to go, and we have an existing tool for stretching unis.

So pick your desired number of planets for the agreed upon uni size. Options are:
24 32 40 60 96 128 160 216 240 288 ...and up

Can play the standard uni sizes or can go even bigger with the stretch util.


Playing in a super-sparse uni (rather than with a planet/orbital limit) does provide rather different tactical and strategic dynamics.

For one, you'll need good hab settings, since your natural planet allotment will be so small.
Supposing a large uni with 8 players and 128 planets (16 planets/player = 1/3 of large/sparse): a 1-in-7 race with a bad hab draw is in very dire straits. Might not have any greens in your natural area.

The vast distance between planets makes prop tech more important and makes packets less effective as weapons. Also reduces the opportunities for forking an opponent's planets.
And probably forget about remote mining.