[Malorn]

The problem with refunds is that it discourages the capture of territory. If you are sufficient as-is with few resources but a large refund you don't have much motivation to fix the problem. It's a welfare system that doesn't encourage people to go out and get themselves off of it.

That's one reason I gravitate around ideas involving making territory capture against a large empire easier and increasing the territory capture rewards against those empires. In that way an underdog empire has incentive to capture territory and doing so will at least temporarily help offset their low resource situation. There's no incentive for them to stay in the low-territory situation and the territory capture reduction makes it easier to do back-hacks and split up the dominant empire and actually successfully start making a comeback. In general it also makes large empires bigger targets so it helps naturally solve the problem and encourage 2 empires to gang up on a dominant empire to prevent the situation from even getting that bad.