Disabling crawlers would remove one of the facets of the game (the other main one being the Unit Workshop) that distinguish it from other entries in the Civ series.
Instead of removing them, why not merely weaken them? They could, for example, be moved higher in the tech tree or made more expensive to build.
Right now, it's practically a no-brainer to build crawlers once you have IndAut. Modify them so that humans would have interesting alternatives (to pumping out crawlers) would add variety to the game.
My strategy for modding em is to move them up the tech tree a modest amount
Without rushing projects crawlers might just be balance-able actually.
Alternatively you might increase Secret Project costs
Going the "any possibility I could imagine" route, I'd probably limit crawlers per city by support in some way, possibly support + industrial production
How hard would it be to keep track of those things? It seems like a lot of knowledge is required about the cities themselves and a good 10 seconds of math
Why is "getting resources independent of population" inherently wrong when population is just an accumulation of nutrients (sometimes just a row or two), ware as a crawler is an accumulation of minerals.
but they are vastly more productive then a crawlers.
Everything is just an accumulation of nutrients, minerals or energy that gives yet more of the same in a 'catalytic expansion' (aka snowball).
I didn't speak up because I disagree; I spoke up because bringing it up so abruptly and bluntly to someone you just met is rude.
I am sorry if my writing can be a bit grating, I assure you it is not from any haste or intentional sloppiness on my part, I've had profound difficulty with spelling (below bottom 10th percentile) from a very early age, I do make use of every highlight the spellchecker provides me, but some stuff slips through regardless.
As for your recommendations I like them as a means of slowing down the late game orbital explosion
though they seem to be getting a bit away from the crawler issue.
My rather crude modification was to just triple the cost of all of em so they are near Secret Project cost and to insert another tech 'Orbital Construction' to slightly delay them as well. Your solution is more subtle and I think I will incorporate something like that into my own mod.
As for Specialists I use a 2-3-6 pattern, initial specialists all produce 2/0/0, second tier 2/0/1, Transcendi produce 2/2/2 to perfectly obsolete all the earlier ones. This is a considerable nerf vs the original output in research and credits so mass specialists combined with mass crawled food should be less powerful.
The overall thrust of your desire to 'slow the snowball' is exactly what I've endeavored to do with my own modding, you should check it out. So far I've just posted snippets but I'll eventually provide a zip of the whole thing.
I was incorporating the satellite changes and decided to go with this sequence, Space Flight gives Pods which cost 12 (rows), Advanced Space Flight gives Power Transmitters which cost 24. AdvSpace and NanoMininturization are the prerequisites of Orbital Construction my new tech (which itself leads to Super Tensile Solids), it gives both Nesus and Sky Hydroponics which both cost 36. I think having minerals and nutrients higher then energy is wise because they are much more snow-ball inclined then a few raw energy.
More good stuff, I've also put Empathi 1/2/0 (Credits/Psych/Research), but nerfed the Engineer down to 2/0/1 (I also renamed them Cyborgs for flavor) and Thinker goes to 0/1/2. The latter two then switch tech requirements of Fusion and MindMac again for flavor and consistency with the Cyborg change.
My nerf to all forest related strategies is to take forest down to 1/1/1, after that I don't need to do nearly anything to delay the Tree facilities themselves.
Recycle Tanks and high Base productivity can indeed encourage ICS, but I've significantly increased facility maintenance costs and this has the effect of making small bases unable to achieve net positive credits from anything but the earliest facilities.
I've modified SE significantly as well but I place a -1 Growth on Survival value and the None-Future choice which prevents Pop Booming for most of the game.
Going the "any possibility I could imagine" route, I'd probably limit crawlers per city by support in some way, possibly support + industrial production
I considered a limit per city, but that'd encourage lots of small bases, which is already an ugly but effective strategy. Limiting it in a way that depends on industrial production might work, though...I do think that INDUSTRY is a better one to use than SUPPORT, though...
How does "{base's free mineral production}/(10-INDUSTRY), rounded down" sound? (As a bonus, this has an in-game meaning already; it's the maximum number of rows for a unit or facility in order to be able to produce it in 1 turn). At 0 industry rating, a decent-sized city can support 2 or maybe even 3 crawlers, but widespread use will not be supportable until you get late-game mineral boosters/Nessus mining stations. Throw in the project/prototype limits I mentioned earlier, and that should work.