Proportions mod: So confusing! [Archive]

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Mylon

September 8th, 2002, 04:34 AM

Well I just fired up the latest Version of proportions and already I'm somewhat lost. It seems that a huge amount of the facilities are redundant, if not plain useless.

Settlements cannot be upgraded into cities, and seem in themselves pretty useless. Cultural Centers and Colony World Cultural Centers are duplicates of each other. Many of the buildings are replaced by higher tech Versions before they're even constructed (Ship training). There also seems to be parallel development of the same basic structures (Mineral miner facility, mineral miner complex, ect). The sheer number of facilities already promises to make finding the right one among the list a little bothersome, given how the mod tries to focus on upgrading facilities rather than building higher level ones.

Am I misunderstanding something in thinking many of these structures to be useless? The update list of Proportions said that upgrading was removed from portions of the city development tree due to how it was "abused". I would suggest increasing the cost of the settlements instead of removing the tree entirely to make the lowest level (no research/intel points) more appealing if it can be upgraded rather than being replaced.

As a suggestion, which should I focus on? Building cities, or building individual structures (research facilities, mineral extraction, ect...)?

PvK

September 8th, 2002, 05:46 AM

Thanks for the Feedback, Mylon!

One of the themes of Proportions is that there is often no single "right" choice, and that few things are actually useless, even if their appeal might not be seen immediately.

One of the main trade-off choices in colony development is a matter of time and resource investment. In general, however, it is most efficient to "fill up the slots" with cheap facilities first, and then steadily upgrade or scrap and replace them with larger ones. It is inefficient to build a Complex or Megacomplex if you haven't already used up all the slots you intend for that type on ordinary-sized facilities.

Building a spaceyard to increase planetary development is usually worthwhile for a planet with more than a few slots. Shipping population there is also very important, if you want the colony to develop with any speed. The resource value of a planet is of course a major factor - cities are of course best to build on planets with high values in all resources.

Generally it won't be possible to fully develop ALL colonies at once - a few of the best ones in good locations should be concentrated on, while the others can be slowly built up, and a resupply & spaceyard network is important to develop if you want to have reasonable fleet mobility in your part of space.

On a good planet, urban facilities (city +) are the best ones to have, but are major investments of time and resources, so they are not always the best ones to build, at least not at once. I recommend only building them on planets in defendable positions, and only after filling up most or all of the planets' slots with small facilities. Generally you really want to ship at least 20M population there and build a spaceyard there before trying to build a city. An exception is a Tiny planet with high resource values in all slots - these may be best starting with a small city, and then upgrading.

Another approach is to let your opponents build colonies while you build military bases and invasion fleets... and then take their colonies...

I'll look at the settlement and community facilities again, but I'm not sure there is any better way to do it given the intrinsic SE4 upgrade system. Some players specifically requested a way to make a small civilian presence on a colony without building up a full-scale city. If upgrades are allowed, SE4 with always charge 50% to upgrade to any higher level, which means there is a limit to the span of costs that can be offered along one upgrade path, without creating a cost shortcut that makes ordinary construction hugely inefficient.

I'm not sure what you mean about training facilities. Anyone can build level one facs by default, which train up to +5. The level two facs are +7 ... probably worth it, but 2% isn't a big deal - the research might be better in other areas. Training Fac III requies another level of Military Science and Advanced Military Science, so not all races will bother to rush for that, particularly since it only trains up to +9. Again, it's worth it, but there are a number of other R&D paths which are just as useful, or more so.

PvK

Mylon

September 8th, 2002, 06:00 AM

Well I see what you're talking about with the matter of upgrades. It would, after all, be quite silly to put down a settlement and immediately get a Cultural Center at half price.

I suppose not much can be done given how the program handles upgrades. It if boosted construction by giving a kickstart of half of the original structure's value, then having a long upgrade tree (including facilities to complexes upgrades) would be more feasable. I just feel bad about having to sacrifice the facility to build over it when upgrading allows it to still be productive during the construction.

Anyway, I would like to suggest some way of making transportation of slightly larger portions of colonists easier to obtain. A medium freightor cannot transport 2M worth of colonists.

Mylon

September 8th, 2002, 06:24 AM

I noticed another problem with the upgrading... It seems that whenever I upgrade, I can only upgrade to the highest building available. Ie... If I build a minor city, I can only upgrade it to a metropolis. Probably another hardcoded problem.

Mylon

September 8th, 2002, 06:42 AM

Suggestion: Would it be possible for each city to give the colony a (stackable) production bonus? I'm thinking it'd be pretty impractical to build cultural centers even on a ring world due to the limited production capacity.

Sinapus

September 8th, 2002, 07:52 AM

Another suggestion: Why not just one type of colony settlement sort of facility instead of one for each planet type?

PvK

September 8th, 2002, 11:10 AM

Originally posted by Mylon:
I noticed another problem with the upgrading... It seems that whenever I upgrade, I can only upgrade to the highest building available. Ie... If I build a minor city, I can only upgrade it to a metropolis. Probably another hardcoded problem.True. Hard-code problem. That's why I have some cheap extra techs so you can at least choose what the highest level is.

PvK

PvK

September 8th, 2002, 11:12 AM

Originally posted by Sinapus:
Another suggestion: Why not just one type of colony settlement sort of facility instead of one for each planet type?Because I was using the graphics for the colony type, and it shows a colony of the appropriate type. I thought it was neat. For a later Version I may make them a bit distinct from each other.

PvK

PvK

September 8th, 2002, 11:13 AM

Originally posted by Mylon:
Suggestion: Would it be possible for each city to give the colony a (stackable) production bonus? I'm thinking it'd be pretty impractical to build cultural centers even on a ring world due to the limited production capacity.I tried that originally. It's not possible because the game won't let you build more than one facility with construction ability on a planet.

PvK

PvK

September 8th, 2002, 11:16 AM

Originally posted by Mylon:
...
I suppose not much can be done given how the program handles upgrades. It if boosted construction by giving a kickstart of half of the original structure's value, then having a long upgrade tree (including facilities to complexes upgrades) would be more feasable. I just feel bad about having to sacrifice the facility to build over it when upgrading allows it to still be productive during the construction.

Anyway, I would like to suggest some way of making transportation of slightly larger portions of colonists easier to obtain. A medium freightor cannot transport 2M worth of colonists.Well you usually don't "have" to scrap the settlement for a long long time - you can just add a city to it. It's usually worth keeping around since it has greater total abilities than most regular facilities.

As for freighters, you haven't researched far enough. You can get 2M on a med. transport if you research cargo and/or starliner modules high enough. Of course, you can also just build more ships.

PvK

Mylon

September 8th, 2002, 02:48 PM

On huge domed planets, the facility slots fill up pretty quickly and you have to destroy a settlement to build a city, which can take many a turn without a space yard.

Medium freighters + Population Liner III can only hold 1M, still. Having to get module IV or so is a bit much to research just to double what you can do with module I.

Yet another hardcoded problem I noticed: Space yards make the penalties trivial. A colony with 1M population can build at 2000 per resource per turn.

Phoenix-D

September 8th, 2002, 07:45 PM

"Yet another hardcoded problem I noticed: Space yards make the penalties trivial. A colony with 1M population can build at 2000 per resource per turn."

Umm, not in the Proportions game I'm playing on PBW.. I have a breathable world with a space yard II, 105 million people, and it only produces at 1370, not 2500 (which is what the yard would do normally)

Phoenix-D

PvK

September 8th, 2002, 10:32 PM

Originally posted by Mylon:
On huge domed planets, the facility slots fill up pretty quickly and you have to destroy a settlement to build a city, which can take many a turn without a space yard.
An average empire can put five slots on a huge domed colony. It usually takes a few years to build even one city. I don't see anything out of line.

Medium freighters + Population Liner III can only hold 1M, still. Having to get module IV or so is a bit much to research just to double what you can do with module I.
Well, it's my opinion that it is a bit much to try to get 2M colonists and their necessities onto a medium-sized ship, from the design standpoint of Proportions. Doubling the capacity of a population transport isn't something I think should be a casual achievement. On the other hand, it doesn't take any research to just build two ships and fleet them...

Yet another hardcoded problem I noticed: Space yards make the penalties trivial. A colony with 1M population can build at 2000 per resource per turn.As Phoenix-D pointed out, you're mistaken about that.

PvK

Mylon

September 8th, 2002, 11:46 PM

Check http://www.liquid2k.com/mylon/screen1.jpg and http://www.liquid2k.com/mylon/screen2.jpg

I couldn't figure out how to get both population and production in the same screenshot, but this works. Is this a bug?

PvK

September 9th, 2002, 01:42 AM

The first screenshot isn't loading... oh, my fault for using a crummy web browser like Internet Explorer. Opera shows it just fine.

13M is a 35% ship yard rate factor, so it does look a bit high at 2075 construction rate, though it depends. I'd need to know what tech level your construction yard is, and what your other modifiers are. Are you Hardy Industrialists? What is your construction aptitude level? Do you have any system-wide construction-accelerating facilities? Etc. You could send me your saved game, if you like.

PvK

Mylon

September 9th, 2002, 02:33 AM

Oh... I guess those population modifiers don't modify bonuses in themselves. So building a spaceyard doesn't give me a 45% production bonus, it gives me a 300% production bonus (-75% to -30%).

Well... I guess hardy industrialist pretty useful for low level colonies!

Suicide Junkie

September 9th, 2002, 06:38 PM

Building a spaceyard dosen't give you a build rate bonus, it simply sets the base build rate to the abilities of the space yard.
All your rate modifiers are then added up and multiplied with the new base rate.

DirectorTsaarx

September 9th, 2002, 07:01 PM

Originally posted by Suicide Junkie:
Building a spaceyard dosen't give you a build rate bonus, it simply sets the base build rate to the abilities of the space yard.
All your rate modifiers are then added up and multiplied with the new base rate.Building a spaceyard gives you the effect of a "build rate bonus" if you have the hardy industrialist trait (which gives a bonus to "planetary space yards"). IOW, the unmodded game allows planets to build at a base rate of 2000/2000/2000 without a yard; adding a Spaceyard I (without HI trait) keeps the base build rate at 2000/2000/2000, but you can build ships as well; adding a SY1 when your race has the HI trait gives a base build rate of 2500/2500/2500; if you also use racial points for increasing space yard rate, you can get even better figures (I've got a game going (non-Proportions) where I took space yard rate to 20% bonus, plus HI, and a SY1 on a new colony allows building at 2900/2900/2900; new colonies without a SY only build at 2000/2000/2000.

That appears to be what Mylon has done as well, since he refers to a "45% bonus" by building a space yard facility...

[ September 09, 2002, 18:02: Message edited by: DirectorTsaarx ]

Aub

September 10th, 2002, 03:55 AM

Another question on Proportions design.

The cities and cultural centers have phased shields. This makes it nearly impossible to take out a homeworld in early or mid-game, even one of a minor race (we are talking about 20000 shield points!).

When you DO want to take one out, however, null-space weapons (and shiled-damaging weapons, if you're temporal) become priceless.

Doesn't it create imbalance towards shield-damaging weapons?

Thanks -- Aub

Mylon

September 10th, 2002, 04:34 AM

Heh... Is what I'm concerned with is someone building like 10 space yards over their homeworld (or any non-domed planet) and dedicating most of them towards weapon platform/satellite construction. I know I do it!

PvK

September 10th, 2002, 08:02 AM

The phased shield ability of cultural centers isn't perfect. Ideally, I would just give the facilities large amounts of hit points, but that is not possible. I may experiment with re-adjusting the "damage per population" in settings.txt, as I believe this still affects the damage required to destroy any facility. However there still isn't a perfect way to express the difference between the damage required to destroy, say, a resupply depot, and the damage required to destroy an entire civilization.

It's true that shield-skipping weapons end up being powerful against cultural centers, but who's to say that a null space weapon would not in reality have a great effect against at atmosphere? At any rate, there are still other ways to vaporize a homeworld's shields, such as planetary weapons, anti-planet drones, fighter-bombers, and shield depleters.

This is one case where I didn't see many choices in what I could do, but there was a very important balance issue, which was that it is a major game event if a homeworld is destroyed or captured, so it should be possible to defend one, and take a major effort to destroy or conquer one.

As Mylon mentions, players can and should keep some potent defenses at a homeworld. The cargo capacity is huge, so the 20K intrinsic shields are just part of the difficulty in attacking one. Defense bases and weapon platforms and fighters and satellites and drones and troops can be amassed, and should be expected.

Consider too that major effects can be caused simply by blockading a homeworld. That in itself has caused some human players to concede defeat.

PvK

[ September 10, 2002, 07:04: Message edited by: PvK ]

Mylon

September 10th, 2002, 03:37 PM

I'll email you those save files latter today. Meanwhile, a few suggestions for Proportions:

Cultural centers. I'd like to see them at least halved in price. It _should_ be reasonable that a homeworld could actually build 18 of them within a reasonable time before developing useful space flight. Yes, they may be massive in size, and 50 years may make sense for their size, but that is also 500 turns.

Along the same vein, perhaps population production bonuses should be increased significantly. Most colonies with about 100 M population can produce almost half of what a homeworld can. I would think a homeworld would be more productive. Also, the population growth should be bonus significantly increased in cost. A +10 bonus to population growth is fairly cheap and is actually added directly on despite other modifiers (bad planet conditions, angry, ect), thus allowing a population to double in say 4-5 years rather than 15.

Another thing I would like to see would be enhanced cities based on other tech advances. This would probably be a pain to impliment, as there could easily be 81 or so combinations for each level of city. The idea is that a level of applied research would not only improve the quality of research centers, but the research bonus given by cities as well. Likewise for organics extraction, mineral extraction, ect. If this is followed through, I would suggest removing the current upgrade-chains in the current city lineup to make this a bit easier to handle. Likewise, without the city chain cities should be made somewhat cheaper (where a metropolis used to cost 65k (minor city + upgrade), they would now cost 100k! Upgrading the cultural centers on the homeworld would probably never happen unless there is a dramatic reduction in cost (or production in bonus), but it would be nice to add upgraded Versions for other well developed planets.

Considering how most other techs double in usefulness with the second level of research, it would make sense that this would apply to starliner modules as well. And I keep buging you because paying for the life support, bridge, engines, and solar collectors (They don't go very far without them!) gets expensive if you have to pay for 20 rather than 10.

dogscoff

September 10th, 2002, 04:06 PM

I'm a keen proportions player, and I would say that although Mylon's suggestions in the previous post are well thought out, I would vote against all of them except the increased range of cities. Sorry Mylon http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/tongue.gif I like the economics as they are now. The new range of cities would be an utter nightmare to implement and upgrade, but would be cool. Maybe you should try to get a more flexible upgrade system into the next patch before attempting to implement them.

One thing I will suggest though is a set of combination bonus facilities - ie fleet+ship training, citizen databank+computer complex etc. Have it so you can upgrade to them from the singular Versions.

DocShane

September 10th, 2002, 04:29 PM

Originally posted by Mylon:
[QB]It seems that a huge amount of the facilities are redundant, if not plain useless.

Settlements cannot be upgraded into cities, and seem in themselves pretty useless. Cultural Centers and Colony World Cultural Centers are duplicates of each other. Many of the buildings are replaced by higher tech Versions before they're even constructed (Ship training). There also seems to be parallel development of the same basic structures (Mineral miner facility, mineral miner complex, ect). The sheer number of facilities already promises to make finding the right one among the list a little bothersome, given how the mod tries to focus on upgrading facilities rather than building higher level ones.
QB]This sounds like the real world, which is what I think PvK is trying to mirror with the proportions mod. After all, I bet your local post office is not a brand new building with the latest and greatest sorting technology. Heck, my post office in a town of 300 is nothing more than a shed with a space heater for the winter, quite literally. In the town nearby there is a larger brick postal building, a UPS agent, 2 internet providers, and a courier service. How many different ways do you need to send a message? They are redundant, but each has its own particular strengths and weaknesses. I use all of them at different times for different reasons. Proportions mimics this by giving you choices. Sometimes they are confusing choices, and sometimes you will make bad choices, but this real world.

Thanks PvK. I want to encourage you to continue making the mod more complex and more confusing. For a newby to the SEIV universe, the standard game has plenty of complexity. But for those of us more experienced with SEIV, the standard game is good, but has lost it's "Fog of War" appeal. IMHO a good wargame recreates the uncertainty of conflict and the ability to make bad choices. Standard SEIV has done a very good job of this for a wargame, but the proportions mod takes it even a step further.

dogscoff

September 10th, 2002, 04:54 PM

IMHO a good wargame recreates the uncertainty of conflict and the ability to make bad choices. Standard SEIV has done a very good job of this for a wargame, but the proportions mod takes it even a step further.
Agreed. I would put it another way and say that Proportions takes SEIV and pushes it even further from being simply a wargame into the territory of "empire simulator".

Puke

September 10th, 2002, 08:30 PM

Originally posted by PvK:
The phased shield ability of cultural centers isn't perfect. Ideally, I would just give the facilities large amounts of hit points, but that is not possible. sorry that im dumb, but why not?

capnq

September 10th, 2002, 09:10 PM

Ideally, I would just give the facilities large amounts of hit points, but that is not possible.

sorry that im dumb, but why not? Facilities don't have "hit points"; they're destroyed collaterally with the planet's population.

Puke

September 10th, 2002, 09:24 PM

hmm, thats right. why do smartbombs do 200 points of damage, then? does that need to be changed if the damage to kill a population unit is increased?

Sinapus

September 10th, 2002, 09:41 PM

Originally posted by Puke:
hmm, thats right. why do smartbombs do 200 points of damage, then? does that need to be changed if the damage to kill a population unit is increased?IIRC, it doesn't. It also looks like one hit, regardless of damage, will kill at least one population unit. Though that was Last tested over a year ago, pre-Gold. Dunno if it's been changed or not.

Also, I think damage for neutron bombs is something the game reads to figure out how many people it kills per hit. Haven't really tested that, though.

[ September 10, 2002, 20:42: Message edited by: Sinapus ]

PvK

September 12th, 2002, 07:59 AM

Originally posted by Mylon:
I'll email you those save files latter today. Meanwhile, a few suggestions for Proportions:

Cultural centers. I'd like to see them at least halved in price. It _should_ be reasonable that a homeworld could actually build 18 of them within a reasonable time before developing useful space flight. Yes, they may be massive in size, and 50 years may make sense for their size, but that is also 500 turns.
18 of them? Well at 100 years a piece, that's only 1800 years. It took Earth more than twice that long to produce substantially fewer than that.

Also note that you can build a colony that is more productive than a cultural center, and produces exactly what you want it to, in far less time than it takes to build a cultural center. It won't be as compact and it won't have the exact same bonuses, but that's the difference between building heaps of infrastructure, and actually developing a culture. Or, at least, Proportions' representation of that difference in SE4 terms.

I do think though that I will probably, eventually, adjust the abilities and cost of the "Colony World Cultural Center" facility. Maybe even before anyone succeeds in actually building one in a game... http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon12.gif

Along the same vein, perhaps population production bonuses should be increased significantly. Most colonies with about 100 M population can produce almost half of what a homeworld can. I would think a homeworld would be more productive. Also, the population growth should be bonus significantly increased in cost. A +10 bonus to population growth is fairly cheap and is actually added directly on despite other modifiers (bad planet conditions, angry, ect), thus allowing a population to double in say 4-5 years rather than 15.
I've considered this sort of idea before. Originally, cultural centers did have a construction ability, but that meant you could never build more than one on a planet, or replace one on a homeworld. It also resulted in the ability to produce very expensive items in a very short time, because of the single planetary build queue. There are rationalizations for how a homeworld should in fact be able to snap together a capital ship in one turn, but on reflection, I kind of like the existing system, in part because you can't build hugely expensive things in a short time.

What you can do (and most humans and AI seem to do this) is actually build a bunch of construction yards in space over a homeworld. This has a number of advantages (from a design/interestingness perspective) over giving a homeworld a huge construction ability. The advantages, as I see them, are:

* You can build as much as your actual infrastructure investment (in BSY's) lets you.
* You are still limited to long build times for expensive items.
* You have to consider the cost and maintenance cost of your production facilities.
* The enemy can raid your orbital bases without having to battle your homeworld to the death.
* If enemy blockaders can't get close enough to destroy your homeworld BSY's, they can still produce defense forces even if enemy blockade and/or ground troops are causing your homeworld to riot.

Another thing I would like to see would be enhanced cities based on other tech advances. This would probably be a pain to impliment, as there could easily be 81 or so combinations for each level of city. The idea is that a level of applied research would not only improve the quality of research centers, but the research bonus given by cities as well. Likewise for organics extraction, mineral extraction, ect. If this is followed through, I would suggest removing the current upgrade-chains in the current city lineup to make this a bit easier to handle. Likewise, without the city chain cities should be made somewhat cheaper (where a metropolis used to cost 65k (minor city + upgrade), they would now cost 100k! Upgrading the cultural centers on the homeworld would probably never happen unless there is a dramatic reduction in cost (or production in bonus), but it would be nice to add upgraded Versions for other well developed planets.
Not a bad idea, although I wish I had the time/energy to design and mod 81 city variants, not to mention the other stuff I would rather do first. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon12.gif Of course, what you can do is use the existing rate-modifying facilities already in the game to gain multipliers to standard facility abilities. See Robot Factory, Mineral Scanner, etc.

Considering how most other techs double in usefulness with the second level of research, it would make sense that this would apply to starliner modules as well. And I keep buging you because paying for the life support, bridge, engines, and solar collectors (They don't go very far without them!) gets expensive if you have to pay for 20 rather than 10.Hehe. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon7.gif Of course you can feel free to do so for your own enjoyment. Another idea would be to halve population mass to 500kT, if you just want faster development. However the point of having these hardships in Proportions is of course to make it the Herculean task it actually would be (actually, I think it's pretty easy compared to "reality") to move many millions of colonists to inhospitable alien worlds and turn them into self-supportive and productive colonies. Another reason starliner modules don't double at tech level 2 is because of my imagination of how difficult it would be to overcome the basic and very enormous physical requirements of moving a million folks and keeping them alive on board and shipped with enough stuff to allow them to do anything but fight for survival (and probably lose) at their destination.

If I were to implement this suggestion, it would probably be by calling the current level I, "level II", and then defining a level I that was twice as lame as the current level I. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon12.gif

PvK

PvK

September 12th, 2002, 08:03 AM

To be clear, Mylon, I'm not saying any of your suggestions aren't good or wouldn't make the mod more fun for many people. And, thanks extremely much for the suggestions and feedback - I love to hear what people think and their experiences with the mod. The feedback is what's inspired me to keep developing the mod.

I'm sure that some severe lightening up of some of my scales could make the game more appealing to many players. And, I invite you or anyone to do variants to suit their own tastes. It's just not quite what I've been trying to do with my Version of it.

PvK

Mylon

September 13th, 2002, 05:59 PM

Sure, it took Earth twice as long to build less than 18 cultural centers, but also consider Earth's population (the 6-7 billion mark we're at now is a pretty recent thing. It wasn't always like that!), our technology level (I assume a world that can build economical space ships would be able to produce more), and the fact that our planet is hardly a single entity of people like the united force a player controls in SEIV. Imagine what we could do if we stopped blowing each other up and built stuff together for a mere two centuries. I'd imagine we'd build those 18 cultural centers pretty quickly. I don't really expect homeworlds to build dreadnauts in one turn, but I would like to see production bonuses for larger populations increased to some degree to make facility building a little faster.

As for population transport... Why not make it more expensive to research level one and level two? The idea is that it still should be cheaper than building a battleship sized population transport in terms of research costs. A counter to the ease of population transport, as I've already suggested, is to decrease population reproduction and likewise increase the point cost of faster reproduction. This way an empire can spread faster, but not necessarily develop faster.

The main reason I like cities is because of their compactness. One idea of making the city variants with much less hassle would be to only make 3 levels or so for each city. Instead of discovering a new city type each time you research applied research, mineral producion, applied intelligence, ect, given a new level of city when one level of every field is researched. Thus, the Metropolis Level 2 wouldn't appear until level 2 was reached in mineral production, applied research, applied intelligence, radioactives extraction, organics exctraction, and possily political science (on the grounds that urban pacification might help a little). Under this system, it might be wise to tone down the level 1 cities a little.

Another idea would be to make a space yard-city combination in addition to the cultural world center that could possibly replace the space-cities that have a resupply depot built into them. This way one can bypass the 1-production limit by having one special production center and the rest of the buildings as other urban-type structures.

Mylon

September 14th, 2002, 07:02 AM

Just a clarification for my enhanced cities idea, since even to me it seems a little confusing the way I said it:

Instead of having a hundred or so city varients that reflect each individual advances, cities could instead reflect these individual advances but at less frequent intervals. These invervals could be marked based on levels in every area. When one level of every applicable field is researched, only then does a new level of a city become available. Thus, to uncover metropolis level two, one must research one level of applied research, one level of all three extractions, one level of applied intelligence _and_ perhaps some other appropriate techs (applied political science?). Thus, the advancement of cities based on other technology could be modelled without designing a hundred or so variants of each city to reflect smaller advancements in the individual areas. It isn't perfect, but it's a nice approximation. I'd also like to see easier upgrading in certain manners (upgrading metropolis level 1 to metropolis level 2 should be much faster than the current 1/2 of the time of building a new one, for example), but this area isn't necessarily a mod issue. I just think SEIV wasn't really designed to handle expensive facilities this way.

nitey

September 15th, 2002, 03:58 PM

Pvk,

BTW, thanks for all your work on the proportions mod. I have a few questions though that I didn't seem to find in your read me files:

1. Ruins: I've only played two games (whiched ended prematurely) so far, but I don't seem to be getting a technology bump when colonizing ruins. But it does seem that my current projects seem to finish faster. Have you changed the free technology for an amount of research points?

2. Starting with 1 planet on your mod, seems very slow, so I bumped a 2nd game to starting with 3 plants. Even with average/bad planets, it feels like overkill. Does the game hard code the starting resources for the 2nd and 3rd planets to be like the first or is there a way to tone down the starting resources on the 2nd and 3rd planets?

3. I also think that the amount of engines on the Rock colony ship is a bit low. Movement of only 2 squares until you get to tech 3 on engines (and then it only goes up to 3) is a bit too slow IMO. While I understand you like this, if I wanted to change this to make my colony ships only 1 square faster what would I need to change and where.

BTW, while this isn't on the topic of your mod, what victory conditions do you normally choose and why? I don't particularly like the total points because everytime I reach that point all the races declare war on me (not exactly my goal).

Thanks for your time.

Mylon

September 15th, 2002, 04:10 PM

The idea with proportions is that since everything goes slower, you just generate turns more often. I can easily run through 100 turns before I really get anywhere in the game. This is probably a problem when playing against other players, though, as 100 turns will likely take 100 days.

Graeme Dice

September 16th, 2002, 12:29 AM

Originally posted by PvK:
[/qb]18 of them? Well at 100 years a piece, that's only 1800 years. It took Earth more than twice that long to produce substantially fewer than that.[/quote]
Not really. We've gone from pure agricultural to our modern infrastructure in about 200 years.

An advanced space-faring society shouldn't need large populations to create great amounts of resources anyways, as those kinds of things can be automated.

nitey

September 16th, 2002, 03:44 AM

Pvk,

Another thing I've noticed. I've been trying to start a new game and if I select an Existing Race template, I get a error (unable to open file). I can create a new race emp file without a problem.

However, when I check all races scores visible to all races and start the game, the ABBIDON and the EEE have ridicuously high research/population and scores compared to all the rest of the races. Any idea why this is happening? It's consistant, you should be able to see it for yourself or I can send you a save game if you wish. I'm using Version 1.78.

PvK

September 16th, 2002, 03:51 AM

I've had to work Saturday and Sunday this weekend, but here goes. I'll reply to nitey first, because his are easiest to answer:

Originally posted by nitey:
Pvk,

BTW, thanks for all your work on the proportions mod. I have a few questions though that I didn't seem to find in your read me files:
Thanks for the feedback!

1. Ruins: I've only played two games (whiched ended prematurely) so far, but I don't seem to be getting a technology bump when colonizing ruins. But it does seem that my current projects seem to finish faster. Have you changed the free technology for an amount of research points?
No, there's no way to mod research points into ruins. What I did do is add more ruins, but make most of them red herrings. Ruins in Proportions just indicate the possibility of something worth analyzing. You don't know if you'll get anything until you go get it.

I also made it so that after acquiring an ancient tech area, you need to reasearch it before you can build anything with it.

2. Starting with 1 planet on your mod, seems very slow, so I bumped a 2nd game to starting with 3 plants. Even with average/bad planets, it feels like overkill. Does the game hard code the starting resources for the 2nd and 3rd planets to be like the first or is there a way to tone down the starting resources on the 2nd and 3rd planets?
Yes, there's no way to change the nature of multiple starting worlds. However, I convinced Malfador to make a change in SE4 1.78 that allows you to set the strength of your homeworld to whatever you like (before 1.78, it used to have a max effective value):

Go to settings.txt in your Proportions/data directory, and edit the lines:

Plr Planet Value Low := 80
Plr Planet Value Medium Percent := 100
Plr Planet Value High := 120

To higher values. If you want twice the homeworld income, double the values, for example. This way homeworlds (only) will have double the resource value (or whatever value you specify).

3. I also think that the amount of engines on the Rock colony ship is a bit low. Movement of only 2 squares until you get to tech 3 on engines (and then it only goes up to 3) is a bit too slow IMO. While I understand you like this, if I wanted to change this to make my colony ships only 1 square faster what would I need to change and where.
You could take Propulsion Experts or research gravitic drives... http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon12.gif

To change this in the mod, you'd want to go to the Colony Ship entry in VehicleSize.txt and do one of a few possible things:

Option 1) Change "Engines Per Move := 36" to 20. This breaks the scale of the quasi-Netwonian physics, though, if you care. You could increase the mineral cost of the colony ship hull by about 1400 if you want to be more logical about it (approximates the cost of adding extra engines to account for the increased speed).

Option 2) Change "Requirement Max Engines := 8" to 15. The only problem with this is that the AI will not know about this - you'd have to go change all of the AI's to know how many engines to put on a colony ship, or they'd still build slow ones.

Note: Either of the above will start at max base speed 3 and go up by one for each increase in engine tech. Don't do both...

BTW, while this isn't on the topic of your mod, what victory conditions do you normally choose and why? I don't particularly like the total points because everytime I reach that point all the races declare war on me (not exactly my goal).

Thanks for your time.I usually don't pick any formal, game-enforced victory conditions, because they might end a game at a point where I was still enjoying it. Usually I like to see each empire set their own goals according to what makes sense for them. On PBW, sometimes it is fun and helpful to invent some interesting victory conditions. However, when one player dominates the whole quadrant, it's usually pretty self-evident.

PvK

PvK

September 16th, 2002, 04:05 AM

Originally posted by nitey:
Pvk,

Another thing I've noticed. I've been trying to start a new game and if I select an Existing Race template, I get a error (unable to open file). I can create a new race emp file without a problem.
The emp files have to be created for Proportions. The ones included with Proportions should work. Ones from the original game, or shipsets not made for Proportions, won't work.

However, when I check all races scores visible to all races and start the game, the ABBIDON and the EEE have ridicuously high research/population and scores compared to all the rest of the races. Any idea why this is happening? It's consistant, you should be able to see it for yourself or I can send you a save game if you wish. I'm using Version 1.78.I actually did not see this in the few tests I just ran, but I expect that due to your other settings, including un-checking "player homeworlds are all the same size" that they are getting larger planets than the others in your games, probably because they live on Gas Giants, and there are no small Gas Giants. Choosing low value planets will cause this.

PvK

oleg

September 16th, 2002, 04:07 AM

Originally posted by nitey:
Pvk,

Another thing I've noticed. I've been trying to start a new game and if I select an Existing Race template, I get a error (unable to open file). I can create a new race emp file without a problem.

However, when I check all races scores visible to all races and start the game, the ABBIDON and the EEE have ridicuously high research/population and scores compared to all the rest of the races. Any idea why this is happening? It's consistant, you should be able to see it for yourself or I can send you a save game if you wish. I'm using Version 1.78.What Version of Proportions do you use (the latest is 2.42) ? In older Proportions Versions there was no separate emp directory and SEIV tried to load default (non-moded) emp. files. That of course create error Messages. If you get latest Version, try to load one of my races (pequeninos, soul hunters or nostropholo). If you still have a problem, let know.

PvK

September 16th, 2002, 04:22 AM

Originally posted by Mylon:
Sure, it took Earth twice as long to build less than 18 cultural centers, but also consider Earth's population (the 6-7 billion mark we're at now is a pretty recent thing. It wasn't always like that!), our technology level (I assume a world that can build economical space ships would be able to produce more), and the fact that our planet is hardly a single entity of people like the united force a player controls in SEIV. Imagine what we could do if we stopped blowing each other up and built stuff together for a mere two centuries. I'd imagine we'd build those 18 cultural centers pretty quickly. I don't really expect homeworlds to build dreadnauts in one turn, but I would like to see production bonuses for larger populations increased to some degree to make facility building a little faster.
I'll give it a look, although it can be a bunch of work to re-do the population effect curve. Mainly though, as I said, I like the heavy constuction to be something that has to be built and maintained in space.

As for population transport... Why not make it more expensive to research level one and level two? The idea is that it still should be cheaper than building a battleship sized population transport in terms of research costs. A counter to the ease of population transport, as I've already suggested, is to decrease population reproduction and likewise increase the point cost of faster reproduction. This way an empire can spread faster, but not necessarily develop faster.
I don't quite follow what you're suggesting for a change to transport research costs. What do you mean?

As for reducing the reproduction rate, given the way population reproduction rate is calculated in SE4, I think it wouldn't be a very major effect. One has to have a certain minimum population before any difference in repro rates (besides 0% and "greater than 0%") will have on colonies without major population translocation.

The main reason I like cities is because of their compactness. One idea of making the city variants with much less hassle would be to only make 3 levels or so for each city. Instead of discovering a new city type each time you research applied research, mineral producion, applied intelligence, ect, given a new level of city when one level of every field is researched. Thus, the Metropolis Level 2 wouldn't appear until level 2 was reached in mineral production, applied research, applied intelligence, radioactives extraction, organics exctraction, and possily political science (on the grounds that urban pacification might help a little). Under this system, it might be wise to tone down the level 1 cities a little.
Ya, it's a reasonable idea. The SE4 upgrade system is still going to be somewhat problematic, though, since you can only upgrade along one path (and many players seem to like upgrading city->metropolis->etc), and the cost is always half the cost of building one from scratch.

Another idea would be to make a space yard-city combination in addition to the cultural world center that could possibly replace the space-cities that have a resupply depot built into them. This way one can bypass the 1-production limit by having one special production center and the rest of the buildings as other urban-type structures.Yes, that's an interesting idea. Hmm. I wonder if it is possible to fool SE4's "one construction fac per planet" limit by upgrading from a fac without a SY to one that has one... that could be an interesting effect. Note though that if that does not work, then it will be impossible to build one of these cities on a planet that already has a shipyard.

PvK

PvK

September 16th, 2002, 04:26 AM

Originally posted by Mylon:
Just a clarification for my enhanced cities idea, since even to me it seems a little confusing the way I said it:

Instead of having a hundred or so city varients that reflect each individual advances, cities could instead reflect these individual advances but at less frequent intervals. These invervals could be marked based on levels in every area. When one level of every applicable field is researched, only then does a new level of a city become available. Thus, to uncover metropolis level two, one must research one level of applied research, one level of all three extractions, one level of applied intelligence _and_ perhaps some other appropriate techs (applied political science?). Thus, the advancement of cities based on other technology could be modelled without designing a hundred or so variants of each city to reflect smaller advancements in the individual areas. It isn't perfect, but it's a nice approximation. I'd also like to see easier upgrading in certain manners (upgrading metropolis level 1 to metropolis level 2 should be much faster than the current 1/2 of the time of building a new one, for example), but this area isn't necessarily a mod issue. I just think SEIV wasn't really designed to handle expensive facilities this way.You're right - SE4 just doesn't handle complex upgrades. It's really only designed for upgrading to something of about the same cost, like in the standard game.

Your idea is a good one, although I don't know if SE4 would allow upgrades both ways (city->metropolis and city_1->city_2).

PvK

PvK

September 16th, 2002, 04:50 AM

Originally posted by Graeme Dice:
<blockquote>quote:<hr />Originally posted by PvK:
"18 of them? Well at 100 years a piece, that's only 1800 years. It took Earth more than twice that long to produce substantially fewer than that."

Not really. We've gone from pure agricultural to our modern infrastructure in about 200 years.
<hr /></blockquote>If all you care about is the infrastructure, sure. Of course, on the homeworld, there is the advantage that it is the correct atmosphere (composition, pressure, and weather), radiation levels, bioshpere, gravity, and temperature. Overcoming these is part of the massive challenge of creating a productive colony on an alien planet.

A Proportions Cultural center represents more than simply industry and infrastructure, however. It represents the culture, society, history, art, drama, economy, as well as the environment that makes it possible to run and sustain large-scale production, reasearch, and so on so that the planet actually contributes to an empire rather than sucking massive resources just to keep it in existence.

In particular, one of the reasons homeworld research centers are so highly rated compared to colony ones, is because I reject the SE4 premise that research is an additive and transitive phenomenon. Two labs do not research subject A twice as fast as one, and chemistry lab C cannot be switched to researching Applied Intelligence on a moment's notice, nor will it stop researching chemistry because Emperor Juvenile III insists that Political Puppets must be obtained ASAP. So, having cultural centers that cannot be replaced and multiplied during a typical game session, provides a base level of research ability that all empires have, and which will not be warped out of proportion simply by colonizing a hundred alien worlds and mass-producing labs, which is both unrealistic (IMO) and unbalancing.

The ability in itself to multiply your empire's abilities in a few years' time by colonizing alien worlds and turning them into homeworld clones is exactly what Proportions' design premise rejects. Actually attempting such in reality would, it seems to me, lead to complete bankruptcy, so Proportions is actually still quite generous in this from a realism standpoint, in that it can actually still be very worthwhile to do so. It's just not like the standard game, where it's so easy to clone your homeworld that the balance of power hinges on the ability to colonize as fast as possible.

With the change I requested to max homeworld planet value settings in 1.78, however, I might be able to re-do the way some of this works for Proportions 3.0, however. It would probably make sense that homeworlds should have an intrinsically higher value than any alien world, due to the natural habitat.

An advanced space-faring society shouldn't need large populations to create great amounts of resources anyways, as those kinds of things can be automated. True. That's one reason I made the Proportions population effects curve level out pretty drastically after the first 30 million or so.

PvK

[ September 16, 2002, 04:37: Message edited by: PvK ]

PvK

September 16th, 2002, 05:31 AM

Originally posted by Mylon:
The idea with proportions is that since everything goes slower, you just generate turns more often. I can easily run through 100 turns before I really get anywhere in the game. This is probably a problem when playing against other players, though, as 100 turns will likely take 100 days.Yep!

BTW a fan (sorry, I forget which one - Dogscoff? Rollo?) made a utility which auto-runs turns. You could probably get a jump start into a developed game position in Proportions by using this to get to turn 100, or 500, or ... one of the neat things about Proportions (IMO) is that it should extend the interesting play time to several hundred turns (or more) because of the delayed research and development. Especially on High research costs, but even Low or Medium are pretty gradual.

PvK

Mylon

September 16th, 2002, 05:43 AM

Yes, I appreciate the idea of not being able to make homeworld clones easily, but I would like to see making such clones actually possible to some degree. The value improvement plants are in themselves terraforming facilities that adjust gravity, temperature, some air conditions, ect. (and there have been plenty of times when my homeworld has been generated with "unpleasant" conditions).

Still, 500 turns for a race that specializes in fast building (hardy industrialist + 20% space yard rate) is a tad much. 50 turns (5 years!) may seem too short for the description, but that is plenty long building time for one facility and I really doubt that anyone could realistically build more than 3 on any particular planet. And this also makes upgrading them actually possible, if we ever get the ability to upgrade one facility at a time and more levels are added.

Mylon

September 16th, 2002, 05:54 AM

Originally posted by PvK:
You're right - SE4 just doesn't handle complex upgrades. It's really only designed for upgrading to something of about the same cost, like in the standard game.

Your idea is a good one, although I don't know if SE4 would allow upgrades both ways (city->metropolis and city_1->city_2).

PvKWell part if the idea is that you would remove the upgrades between cities totally and adjust the costs somewhat (Metropolises would take forever to build if they were actually 100kT! Technically they're only 65 if you build a minor city first, and you get some amount of production for some of the building time), though you _could_ design the cities in a heirarchy of minor city level 1 > minor city level 2 > minor city level 3 > metropolis level 1, ect, but I don't think it's worth the bother. Especially not since there won't be any way to upgrade to minor city level 3 if you have "cities" uncovered.

From my experience, it seems that metropolises are the most useful infrastructure simply because they're really the only facility that produces a decent amount for the investment. The cities between minor and metropolis merely add build time to getting to metropolis, thus lowering their value.

DirectorTsaarx

September 16th, 2002, 06:12 PM

Originally posted by PvK:
Hmm. I wonder if it is possible to fool SE4's "one construction fac per planet" limit by upgrading from a fac without a SY to one that has one... that could be an interesting effect.
PvKThat's exactly how Suicide Junkie created his "spaceyard enhancers" (or something like that) in P&N... there's a thread about it around here somewhere, including a sample addition to facilities.txt...

nitey

September 16th, 2002, 09:30 PM

Oleg,

>> That of course create error Messages. If you get latest Version, try to load one of my races (pequeninos, soul hunters or nostropholo). If you still have a problem, let know. <<

Your races work fine. It's just all the standard races apparently need to be recreated and saved. BTW, I'm using the latest Version 2.4.2 of proportions.

Pvk,

Thanks for your replies. I suspect that the problem is exactly what you mentioned, since the EEE and ABBIDON start on Gas Giants, they probably end up with more starting facilities compared to everyone else thus more research, etc. points. I'm not totally sure I'll mess with the colony ships, as I want to give your method a bit more time to grow on me, but I sure appreciate you telling me how I can go and adjust it if I want.

Thanks!

oleg

September 17th, 2002, 07:12 AM

Gas Giant races have bigger homeworlds only if you use "poor homeworld value" - rock/ice start on small while gas still have medium. Normal or good homeworld start gives equal homeworlds to all races.

Graeme Dice

September 18th, 2002, 12:37 AM

If all you care about is the infrastructure, sure.That's all that matters for producing materials and constructing ships. Such things would require next to no manpower for an advanced civilization like those in SE4.

Of course, on the homeworld, there is the advantage that it is the correct atmosphere (composition, pressure, and weather), radiation levels, bioshpere, gravity, and temperature. Overcoming these is part of the massive challenge of creating a productive colony on an alien planet.All of which are mostly irrelevant to automated processors, which already exist on ships, and are far more effective than a facility that covers half a continent.

A Proportions Cultural center represents more than simply industry and infrastructure, however. It represents the culture, society, history, art, drama, economy, as well as the environment that makes it possible to run and sustain large-scale production, reasearch, and so on so that the planet actually contributes to an empire rather than sucking massive resources just to keep it in existence.A planet only requires large amounts of resources from another planet if it cannot produce enough food to feed the population. We're talking about completely untouched planets, with material resources similar to Earth. There's no real reason to send anything to the planet past the initial colony set up materials unless the planet is extremely poor.

The ability in itself to multiply your empire's abilities in a few years' time by colonizing alien worlds and turning them into homeworld clones is exactly what Proportions' design premise rejects. Actually attempting such in reality would, it seems to me, lead to complete bankruptcy, so Proportions is actually still quite generous in this from a realism standpoint, in that it can actually still be very worthwhile to do so.If creating colonies that increase production by an order of magnitude bankrupts the empire, then Britain would have been bankrupted a hundred times over by now. Colonies represent untapped resources, and beyond a very short setup period would easily produce more than they take at the tech levels reached in SE4.

With the change I requested to max homeworld planet value settings in 1.78, however, I might be able to re-do the way some of this works for Proportions 3.0, however. It would probably make sense that homeworlds should have an intrinsically higher value than any alien world, due to the natural habitat.Only for things that actually require population, like research, and creating more population.

Sinapus

September 20th, 2002, 12:55 AM

Fyron

September 20th, 2002, 01:43 AM

Originally posted by PvK:
BTW a fan (sorry, I forget which one - Dogscoff? Rollo?) made a utility which auto-runs turns.I am fairly certain that was made by Master Belisarius. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon7.gif

PvK

September 22nd, 2002, 04:04 AM

Originally posted by Sinapus:
...Another thing you can do is put a 'savegame' folder in there and the game will use that when you are saving games. Neat way to keep different game's saves separate. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon7.gif Ah! I didn't know that. Good suggestion, thanks!

PvK

PvK

September 22nd, 2002, 04:10 AM

Originally posted by DirectorTsaarx:
<blockquote>quote:<hr />Originally posted by PvK:
Hmm. I wonder if it is possible to fool SE4's "one construction fac per planet" limit by upgrading from a fac without a SY to one that has one... that could be an interesting effect.
PvKThat's exactly how Suicide Junkie created his "spaceyard enhancers" (or something like that) in P&N... there's a thread about it around here somewhere, including a sample addition to facilities.txt...<hr /></blockquote>Very good to know. I'll have to give that some thought. <g>

PvK

PvK

September 22nd, 2002, 04:39 AM

Originally posted by Mylon:
Yes, I appreciate the idea of not being able to make homeworld clones easily, but I would like to see making such clones actually possible to some degree.

Ya, I suppose they could be a little easier - at least the colony Versions.

The value improvement plants are in themselves terraforming facilities that adjust gravity, temperature, some air conditions, ect. (and there have been plenty of times when my homeworld has been generated with "unpleasant" conditions).


_Value_ improvement doesn't necessarily have anything to do with gravity (if it did, it should require gravitational technology) or atmosphere.

And yes, it's too bad that SE4 makes planetary conditions all on the same random distribution, and with such limited effects. Judging from the one observable solar system we have in real life, we'd have to have a lot more smog before Earth will be less hospitable than any of the other planets... http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon12.gif

... still, as with so many things in the game, conditions don't have to be taken literally, or on parity between different types of planets. For instance, an unpleasant homeworld could mean that there is room for artificial improvement, whereas an unpleasant colony world could mean below-average from the standpoint of an alien world. That's what I assumed in thinking of Proportions mod: the reason it is so hard to build things on an alien world is largely because it's going to be extremely inhospitable, just because it will be such different conditions from any your race was used to.

Still, 500 turns for a race that specializes in fast building (hardy industrialist + 20% space yard rate) is a tad much..500 turns or 500 years? I have an H.I. race in a current game, and on a planet with 7 million colonists and NO space yard, it will build a CC in 400 years. On one with 60 million people and NO space yard, 260 years. On one with 30 million and a level I space yard, 184.7 years. If you've got a colony that can build a cultural center in only 500 turns (50 years), then maybe I should increase the time required.

Because, as I've said recently on this thread before, a cultural center represents a whole civilization, and mass-producing McDonalds and Wall Mart (and strip mines and industry) doesn't count. All that does is add industry (and blandness) to an existing civilization.

No civilization can be created in 50 years. Cities and industry, maybe. Civilizations, no.

50 turns (5 years!) may seem too short for the description, but that is plenty long building time for one facility and I really doubt that anyone could realistically build more than 3 on any particular planet. And this also makes upgrading them actually possible, if we ever get the ability to upgrade one facility at a time and more levels are added.A cultural center is not just "a facility".

PvK

PvK

September 22nd, 2002, 05:10 AM

Originally posted by Graeme Dice:
<blockquote>quote:<hr />If all you care about is the infrastructure, sure.That's all that matters for producing materials and constructing ships. Such things would require next to no manpower for an advanced civilization like those in SE4.<hr /></blockquote>

With the right technology, that's true. However, notice you say "an advanced civilization like those in SE4." What represents that advanced civilization? In standard SE4, nothing. In Proportions, it's represented by the cultural centers. Without the cultural centers, you can have lots of industry, but who's going to provide the authority and direction to put it to use for an empire? A real civilization is not going to "run out of room" at home, and "just need some land to build more factories", or at least, not to the extent abstractly represented by SE4.

<blockquote>quote:<hr /> Of course, on the homeworld, there is the advantage that it is the correct atmosphere (composition, pressure, and weather), radiation levels, bioshpere, gravity, and temperature. Overcoming these is part of the massive challenge of creating a productive colony on an alien planet.All of which are mostly irrelevant to automated processors, which already exist on ships, and are far more effective than a facility that covers half a continent.
<hr /></blockquote>

Technology is definitely not immune to environmental conditions. Try moving a Honda factory to Venus, and see how well it operates. Could one develop technology to do so? Yes, but it would require time, and experimentation with prototypes in that particular environment. A planet consists of many different environments, and it takes years of study to understand them, let alone to develop technologies that function well in them. All of that takes time, intelligent research, and a lot of expense, especially if the planet is years away from your civilization even in the fastest ships your empire can produce.

I can't think of any facility in Proportions, except for cultural facilities, which would cover half a continent.

<blockquote>quote:<hr />A Proportions Cultural center represents more than simply industry and infrastructure, however. It represents the culture, society, history, art, drama, economy, as well as the environment that makes it possible to run and sustain large-scale production, reasearch, and so on so that the planet actually contributes to an empire rather than sucking massive resources just to keep it in existence.A planet only requires large amounts of resources from another planet if it cannot produce enough food to feed the population. We're talking about completely untouched planets, with material resources similar to Earth. There's no real reason to send anything to the planet past the initial colony set up materials unless the planet is extremely poor.
<hr /></blockquote>

That's completely untrue. Try going to any of the planets in Earth's solar system. Try to find anything to eat. Try to find any consumer goods. Try to find breathable air. Try to find building materials. Try to find technological components. Try to find medicine. Ok, so maybe there's plenty of rock and unrefined iron. If you're lucky, you might be able to develop a process for gathering and processing some frozen indigenous water. How many million people were you planning on moving to this planet? What does it take to keep them alive and willing to be there? You expect them to breed and raise children educated there? You don't want them to form their own independant government? Also, for everything they need, how much does it cost to build, maintain and operate the fleet of transport equipment required to get all that stuff there?

<blockquote>quote:<hr />The ability in itself to multiply your empire's abilities in a few years' time by colonizing alien worlds and turning them into homeworld clones is exactly what Proportions' design premise rejects. Actually attempting such in reality would, it seems to me, lead to complete bankruptcy, so Proportions is actually still quite generous in this from a realism standpoint, in that it can actually still be very worthwhile to do so.If creating colonies that increase production by an order of magnitude bankrupts the empire, then Britain would have been bankrupted a hundred times over by now. Colonies represent untapped resources, and beyond a very short setup period would easily produce more than they take at the tech levels reached in SE4.<hr /></blockquote>

How is a colony on a distant alien world going to increase production by an order of magnitude overnight? It seems to me it will mainly involve massive technological and logistical problems, which will at _least_ take a few decades to get up to speed. In Proportions, after just one decade, colonies can provide a major increase in production and other abilities. That seems pretty optimistic to me.

PvK

Skulky

September 22nd, 2002, 11:38 PM

Wow, a real controversy, or rather heated discussion, my question is slightly simpler: Is there any pointin researching the tech areas like colonial development and large support facilites? Also, can i get rid of my space port and resupply facs on my homeworld(s)?

I think it'd be great if you were to outline some of the basic strategies and mechanics of a mod like this. Anything where fundamental gameplay is changed--(which is a great thing, i'm falling in love with proportions over PBW even, i put on medium events and im having a tough time just expanding, and come some star exploding or plauging event i could have some real trouble)--a short (500-1000 word) manual would be really helpful.

thanks

PvK

September 23rd, 2002, 01:04 AM

Thanks for the feedback, Skulky!

Originally posted by Skulky:
... Is there any pointin researching the tech areas like colonial development ...

If you want to try to maximize the production of a good colony world, yes. It gives you the larger city types, although in some cases there are multiple prerequisites involved. It is also there so you can decide NOT to research it, in order to control the size of facilities you will upgrade to, since SE4 always only offers the largest city to upgrade to, and you might not want to try upgrading to a Megalopolis, or something. AI's can also use this to limit what they try to build.

... and large support facilites?

These are mainly useful for military bases on small inhospitable planets. They allow you to add some extra deployment space to a depot or spaceport, which on a domed colony can make a difference in the amount of garrison you can deploy there, without using a whole facility slot on a "Cargo Storage" facility. You might prefer not to have these more expensive Versions showing up when you have "Show Only Latest" toggled on, though, so the tech area there as an option for preference.

Also, can i get rid of my space port and resupply facs on my homeworld(s)?

Yes. Those are entirely redundant, and their slots should be used for other nifty facilities.

I think it'd be great if you were to outline some of the basic strategies and mechanics of a mod like this. Anything where fundamental gameplay is changed--(which is a great thing, i'm falling in love with proportions over PBW even, i put on medium events and im having a tough time just expanding, and come some star exploding or plauging event i could have some real trouble)--a short (500-1000 word) manual would be really helpful.
Ok, I'll see if I can find time and inspiration to do that. I've been pretty busy lately, though - I hoped to get a new Version out, but am still mulling over some ideas (mainly mount stuff).

PvK

Mylon

September 23rd, 2002, 04:05 PM

Originally posted by PvK:
500 turns or 500 years? I have an H.I. race in a current game, and on a planet with 7 million colonists and NO space yard, it will build a CC in 400 years. On one with 60 million people and NO space yard, 260 years. On one with 30 million and a level I space yard, 184.7 years. If you've got a colony that can build a cultural center in only 500 turns (50 years), then maybe I should increase the time required.

Because, as I've said recently on this thread before, a cultural center represents a whole civilization, and mass-producing McDonalds and Wall Mart (and strip mines and industry) doesn't count. All that does is add industry (and blandness) to an existing civilization.

No civilization can be created in 50 years. Cities and industry, maybe. Civilizations, no.
50 years or 500 turns. Guess what? That was my homeworld that was telling me this. Personally, I think you may be focusing a little too much on making it realistic. A ringworld can be constructed in about 25 turns in vanilla SEIV and can easily take about 200 turns or to fill with just facilities, not including cargo or whatnot. 50 turns seems reasonable for a well developed alien world to build something on the order of a cultural center, while 500 turns seems awfully long for even a homeworld.

Graeme Dice

September 24th, 2002, 03:58 AM

With the right technology, that's true. However, notice you say "an advanced civilization like those in SE4." What represents that advanced civilization? In standard SE4, nothing. In Proportions, it's represented by the cultural centers. Without the cultural centers, you can have lots of industry, but who's going to provide the authority and direction to put it to use for an empire?In standard SE4 the advanced civilization is represented by the facilities, after all, it's not going to take more than 10 million or so people in a single city to exploit most of the planet.

A real civilization is not going to "run out of room" at home, and "just need some land to build more factories", or at least, not to the extent abstractly represented by SE4.I would think that all civilizations would do so at some point when their population grows beyond a standard point.

Technology is definitely not immune to environmental conditions. Try moving a Honda factory to Venus, and see how well it operates. Could one develop technology to do so? Yes, but it would require time, and experimentation with prototypes in that particular environment.All that it would take to operate a Honda plant on Venus is a pressure dome. Venus has nearly the same gravity as Earth, so the machinery can be identical.

A planet consists of many different environments, and it takes years of study to understand them, let alone to develop technologies that function well in them. All of that takes time, intelligent research, and a lot of expense, especially if the planet is years away from your civilization even in the fastest ships your empire can produce.At the start of the game, a ship can cross a solar system in two months. In the 1500's, a sailing ship could cross the Atlantic in two months. Futuristic explorers aren't going to be slower than ancient imperialists.

I can't think of any facility in Proportions, except for cultural facilities, which would cover half a continent.Let's say Earth is the model for a medium sized planet, with about 20 facilities on the available land. That's equivalent to a single facility using just slightly less land than all of the U.S.

That's completely untrue. Try going to any of the planets in Earth's solar system. Try to find anything to eat. Try to find any consumer goods. Try to find breathable air.There are plenty of planets in SE4 that have breathable atmospheres.

Try to find building materials. Try to find technological components. Try to find medicine. Ok, so maybe there's plenty of rock and unrefined iron. If you're lucky, you might be able to develop a process for gathering and processing some frozen indigenous water. How many million people were you planning on moving to this planet?I was thinking about 10,000 to start, and give them about a decade or two to get the planet to the infrastructure to the point where it's not much more of a problem than building more houses.

What does it take to keep them alive and willing to be there? You expect them to breed and raise children educated there? You don't want them to form their own independant government? Also, for everything they need, how much does it cost to build, maintain and operate the fleet of transport equipment required to get all that stuff there?

[QUOTE]How is a colony on a distant alien world going to increase production by an order of magnitude overnight? It seems to me it will mainly involve massive technological and logistical problems, which will at _least_ take a few decades to get up to speed. In Proportions, after just one decade, colonies can provide a major increase in production and other abilities. That seems pretty optimistic to me.It seems very pessimistic to me. Remember that a single robo-miner has better mineral extraction performance than a mineral mine that covers the continental U.S.

Mylon

September 24th, 2002, 04:42 PM

Keep in mind that 500 turn figure was a for a rance with a 45% bonus to space yard construction. Even if it was 50 turns for a hardy industrialist, how many would you expect to see? They'd still cost 240kT of materials (!) and drain a significant amount of resources from the empire. At 50 turns each, seeing homeworld clones wouldn't be very likely, since it would still take 900 turns to build as many cultural centers. 90 years may seem a too little to reproduce what Earth has done, but consider this for playability. Earth has had 100 year long wars, maybe some longer ones, but a vanilla game can easily be resolved in 50 years or less. Isn't that a little fast for a war of galatic scale?

Heck, now that I think about it, even 50 turns seems a little long.

[ September 24, 2002, 15:58: Message edited by: Mylon ]

PvK

September 25th, 2002, 10:27 AM

Originally posted by Mylon:
<blockquote>quote:<hr />Originally posted by PvK:
500 turns or 500 years? I have an H.I. race in a current game, and on a planet with 7 million colonists and NO space yard, it will build a CC in 400 years. On one with 60 million people and NO space yard, 260 years. On one with 30 million and a level I space yard, 184.7 years. If you've got a colony that can build a cultural center in only 500 turns (50 years), then maybe I should increase the time required.

Because, as I've said recently on this thread before, a cultural center represents a whole civilization, and mass-producing McDonalds and Wall Mart (and strip mines and industry) doesn't count. All that does is add industry (and blandness) to an existing civilization.

No civilization can be created in 50 years. Cities and industry, maybe. Civilizations, no.
50 years or 500 turns. Guess what? That was my homeworld that was telling me this. Personally, I think you may be focusing a little too much on making it realistic. A ringworld can be constructed in about 25 turns in vanilla SEIV and can easily take about 200 turns or to fill with just facilities, not including cargo or whatnot. 50 turns seems reasonable for a well developed alien world to build something on the order of a cultural center, while 500 turns seems awfully long for even a homeworld.<hr /></blockquote>IF you're just talking about building a bunch of shopping malls, condominiums, infrastructure, factories, and labs on a continental scale, fine, sure; and IF it's on a planet as hospitable as a homeworld, which happens to have a spare continent which is habitable but for some reason has nothing on it; THEN ok, sure, if you have massive amounts of construction equipment and building materials and so on available, and you're people are talented at building, maybe possibly 5 years might be possible, I guess. I think 50 is more like it.

However, that's not what's happening in the game situation. On a homeworld, the nice habitable continents are FULL. Ok, so you can try to build a new living area in the polar regions, or underwater, or something. Look how flourishing the Earth colonies in Alaska and Siberia are... And, it's probably going to be vastly easier to do THAT than to build things and inhabit an alien world far from the homeworld. If you're replacing a destroyed cultural center on the homeworld, the expense and time represent the massive cost and effort of dealing with hundreds of millions of casualties, irradiated land, and so on. Again, it's not like you have a nice flat grass field and 10 billion tons of construction materials, and 100 million bulldozers on hand.

Even so, that's only talking about building the physical part of a cultural center.

What are you imagining a cultural center is? I get the feeling you and Graeme aren't considering or accepting that there is more to a culture than a physical carbon copy.

If you just want the production and research equivalent of a cultural center, you CAN accomplish this in a much shorter period of time. A CC gives 2900 production, 1000 research, and 300 intel. With 15 resource facilities, 10 research facilities, and 2 intel facilities, you can get 200 greater output than that. With a good colonial population and construction yard, these can each be built in one turn, with a total time required of 27 turns = 2.7 years. This is just at tech level I, too. So, YES, it IS possible even in the existing game, to just mass produce facilities and get the equivalent of another cultural center's production, in under 3 years (not counting the shipyard itself, or the time to get the population there, whatever proportion of biological or mechanical labor this represents for your particular empire).

Of course, you'll need a Huge colony world of your atmosphere to get that all on one colony world, but that's how I represent the effects of the planet being completely incompatible with your base race's natural environment, and the massive catalog of other details that would be involved in trying to turn an alien planet into a carbon copy of one's home planet. By upgrading and replacing the basic facilities with complexes, megacomplexes, cultural faciltiies, etc, this represents accomplishing the necessary work of making the transition, and developing things besides just factories and labs.

PvK

PvK

September 25th, 2002, 12:35 PM

Originally posted by Graeme Dice:
<blockquote>quote:<hr />In standard SE4 the advanced civilization is represented by the facilities, after all,
I disagree. I'd say the standard game treats the Player/Empire as the civilization. It looks to me like the facilties are just facilities.

it's not going to take more than 10 million or so people in a single city to exploit most of the planet.
It seems to me from this statement, and from what you've said before, that you see an SE4 colony as simply a military/industrial or research complex. In that case, sure, I agree. That's why I have the population curve for production set to sharply curve at a very low number like this. Yes, you only need a few million people, or even droids, if you just want to operate, say, resource extraction facilities, and it won't do all that much poorer than a planet with 4 billion people and the same facilities.

In Proportions, yes you can do this, and it can make a lot of sense from a miltary/industrial point of view - move a bunch of population (representing mainly construction equipment and droids, if you like) to a colony, build a construction yard to represent setting up local construction infrastructure, and then fill it up with simple facilities, and leave 10 million or so population there. That's an efficient technique in Proportions.

Where we differ, is that you seem to think that that is all that can be done with a planet, or that terraforming and civilizing are trivial and pointless additions. My opinion is that developing a planet from a workshop into a homeworld equivalent evolves many orders of magnitude more. The return on investment is much more shallow, though the potential per planet is eventually greater.

A real civilization is not going to "run out of room" at home, and "just need some land to build more factories", or at least, not to the extent abstractly represented by SE4.I would think that all civilizations would do so at some point when their population grows beyond a standard point.
<hr /></blockquote>I'm not questioning whether it happens at all, but the extent and proportions to which it happens, and the costs, effects, and time involved. Personally, I don't think, for example, that say, Oxford University's contribution to the advancement of Earth's technology and other intellectual fields (yes, there are many others) would be doubled if we could only find another few square Km somewhere to build a replica. Do you? For another example, suppose we find a really rich iron or even petrolium deposit on Mars - how cost-effective do you think it's going to be to develop an extraction plant and transport infrastructure to take advantage of this? How many years did it take to develop the unmanned probe to Mars that crashed because someone had a math error converting Imperial units to Metric, and how much did that cost?

<blockquote>quote:<hr />Technology is definitely not immune to environmental conditions. Try moving a Honda factory to Venus, and see how well it operates. Could one develop technology to do so? Yes, but it would require time, and experimentation with prototypes in that particular environment.All that it would take to operate a Honda plant on Venus is a pressure dome. Venus has nearly the same gravity as Earth, so the machinery can be identical.
<hr /></blockquote>That's a huge over-simplification, it seems to me. For just a few examples:

You need to develop a pressure dome that can withstand the particular conditions of that environment, meaning you have to find out exactly what that environment is like (pressure, temperature, chemical effects, weather phenomena and patterns, volcanic activity, indigenous life forms), meaning you have to guess and then establish an outpost to conduct research, then develop and produce the dome and required life support for it. (For example, it took Earth eleven years and ten probes to get Venera 8 to operate on the surface of Venus. Two years later, Venera 9, and three years later, Venera 10, each succeeded in returning single photographs, before the specially-designed-to-survive probes were destroyed after about 50 minutes each. That was 1975. Since the first probe attempt in 1961, it's been 41 years [~410 SE4 turns], and we still haven't landed anyone on Venus or Mars, let alone planned to build Hondas there.) Then, your Earth-based factory is not a self-contained unit. It takes advantage of Earth infrastructure such as power plants, communications, plumbing, the availability of parts and materials, not to mention the necessities for human life (housing, food, and incentive for people to exist near the factory), and transportation networks (roads, trucks, rails, ships, harbors) to deliver the goods to somewhere useful. Another example of a major obstacle is going to be climate and atmosphere. So you've got a dome - how do you maintain an Earthlike atmosphere and conditions inside it, considering you want to run a factory complex inside it? Another consideration is that building Hondas on Venus isn't going to help Earth unless there is storage and a transportation system in place, and if it's not more efficient than just building another factory on Earth, then it's a net loss. Getting the materials to Venus, and getting the Hondas back from Venus, is surely going to cost huge amounts in rocket fuel and other space transportation expenses. Even these are just a few examples - the specifics would be much more complex and daunting, not to mention expensive and time-consuming. Perhaps not insurmountable, eventually, but certainly not trivial, nor the sort of thing that can be accomplished in a month, without any overhead costs.

<blockquote>quote:<hr /> A planet consists of many different environments, and it takes years of study to understand them, let alone to develop technologies that function well in them. All of that takes time, intelligent research, and a lot of expense, especially if the planet is years away from your civilization even in the fastest ships your empire can produce.At the start of the game, a ship can cross a solar system in two months. In the 1500's, a sailing ship could cross the Atlantic in two months. Futuristic explorers aren't going to be slower than ancient imperialists.
<hr /></blockquote>I guess I wasn't clear. When I wrote "especially if the planet is years away from your civilization even in the fastest ships your empire can produce", that was just a reference to the way SE4 doesn't take distance into acount when figuring empire revenues from colonies. A colony on the far side of the quadrant will contribute just as much to the imperial coffers as one in the home system. However, I didn't mean to say that travel time was the only determining factor in colony production. Even if it were, imagine if SE4 tracked expenses not just for warships but for transports for resources. Even a standard game Escort with a couple of cargo bays is pretty expensive to maintain, and that accounting is highly simplified. I'm not saying that's an accurate representation of costs, but still, it shows the sort of thing I was talking about. If you had to build and maintain escorts to move the resources produced by the colonies, you could see how it could quickly become expensive or even counter-productive to try to build an economy spread out across many solar systems.

<blockquote>quote:<hr />I can't think of any facility in Proportions, except for cultural facilities, which would cover half a continent.Let's say Earth is the model for a medium sized planet, with about 20 facilities on the available land. That's equivalent to a single facility using just slightly less land than all of the U.S.
<hr /></blockquote>As I've said many times on previous threads, and I think on this one too, I don't think it makes any sense to equate planet slots directly to surface area, and hopefully it's obvious that Proportions' facilities do not all represent items that take up the same amount of space. Only the cultural centers are described as continental in size. The facilities just represent facilities, whereas the complexes are complexes of many facilities, but even the Megacomplexes would not, I think, require continental areas. What I do think they require is environment research and development, infrastructure, life support, etc etc. It seems to me, as I've discussed at length, that there are major obstacles and requirements to overcome before a net gain to the empire is achieved. These are (very abstractly) represented in Proportions by the construction costs and the population construction rate curve.

<blockquote>quote:<hr />That's completely untrue. Try going to any of the planets in Earth's solar system. Try to find anything to eat. Try to find any consumer goods. Try to find breathable air.There are plenty of planets in SE4 that have breathable atmospheres.
<hr /></blockquote>Just because a planet has the same basic type of atmosphere as your native atmosphere, doesn't make it breathable. Suppose Venus had an Oxygen-Nitrogen atmosphere. Let's be very generous and say it's even about the same proportion of gasses, and there are no toxic particles or other components. Great, but Venus surface atmosphere is 100 x Earth's pressure, and 600-700 degrees Celsius. Instantly pressure-cooked before anyone can say "Honda." Sounds like a great place to build a new civilization. It should only take a couple of years, right?

<blockquote>quote:<hr /> Try to find building materials. Try to find technological components. Try to find medicine. Ok, so maybe there's plenty of rock and unrefined iron. If you're lucky, you might be able to develop a process for gathering and processing some frozen indigenous water. How many million people were you planning on moving to this planet?I was thinking about 10,000 to start, and give them about a decade or two to get the planet to the infrastructure to the point where it's not much more of a problem than building more houses.
<hr /></blockquote>Ok, so you're saying the actual people can be few, because they can control robots who do the actual work. That seems reasonable, but I would say it would be represented by population units in the game. How much of a population unit is actual people, and how much is droids and equiment and supplies and so on, is abstracted. So how much machinery, equipment, supplies, and machinery are you expecting to need? It too is going to need fuel and spare parts and other materials. Just exploring and studying the environment is going to take a long time, not to mention designing and engineering solutions.

<blockquote>quote:<hr />What does it take to keep them alive and willing to be there? You expect them to breed and raise children educated there? You don't want them to form their own independant government? Also, for everything they need, how much does it cost to build, maintain and operate the fleet of transport equipment required to get all that stuff there?

[QUOTE]How is a colony on a distant alien world going to increase production by an order of magnitude overnight? It seems to me it will mainly involve massive technological and logistical problems, which will at _least_ take a few decades to get up to speed. In Proportions, after just one decade, colonies can provide a major increase in production and other abilities. That seems pretty optimistic to me.It seems very pessimistic to me. Remember that a single robo-miner has better mineral extraction performance than a mineral mine that covers the continental U.S.<hr /></blockquote>A Proportions mine facility does not represent a continent-sized mine. If I were to add a continent-sized mine facility, well, it'd cost a lot more than my MegaComplexes do. The megacomplexes I do have represent less industry than a cultural center contains, and they produce up to 750 units/turn. Now, it's true that a Proportions robo - miner component can produce up to 800 units/turn, but they also have maintenance costs, including the time to get to the destination, which almost require such a high rate or they won't produce a net gain at all. They also decrease the subject's value steadily. I didn't see much way around the hard-coded limits imposed on robo-miners by SE4, but didn't want to throw them out, since they can be interesting to use (especially since they tend to cause political tension between human players). From a technical perspective, though, robo-miners either collect from asteroids. So it seems reasonable that asteroid mining could be massively easier and more efficient (in the short-term, anyway) than descending into an alien planet's atmosphere and trying to build a permanent facility that can sustain itself efficiently on the surface, and then the materials have to be lifted out of the planet's gravity. As for remote-mining an uncolonized planet... that seems like it would be a different problem altogether, but I'm not aware at the moment of a way to modify the way it works in SE4. I think there might be a game option when you set up a game, either in the program or in settings.txt, so that you can't actually remote-mine planets, or the rate is adjusted. I might just be making that up, though.

Anyway, thanks a lot for the discussion and feedback (both to you and everyone who's given feedback).

PvK

[ September 25, 2002, 11:55: Message edited by: PvK ]

PvK

September 25th, 2002, 02:02 PM

Originally posted by Mylon:
Keep in mind that 500 turn figure was a for a rance with a 45% bonus to space yard construction. Even if it was 50 turns for a hardy industrialist, how many would you expect to see? They'd still cost 240kT of materials (!) and drain a significant amount of resources from the empire. At 50 turns each, seeing homeworld clones wouldn't be very likely, since it would still take 900 turns to build as many cultural centers. 90 years may seem a too little to reproduce what Earth has done, but consider this for playability. Earth has had 100 year long wars, maybe some longer ones, but a vanilla game can easily be resolved in 50 years or less. Isn't that a little fast for a war of galatic scale?

Heck, now that I think about it, even 50 turns seems a little long.Well, these are mostly "playability" concerns. Ya, it can be more exciting to play a faster game. There's a lot of distance between Proportions' pacing (quite slow, but still generous compared to my sense of what would be realistic) and that of the standard set (very fast-paced, so it's actually possible to conquer and terraform hundreds of solar systems, and master all sciences, in a matter of decades). I was actually surprised that so many players liked Proportions' pacing so well. I'd expect most players to prefer something between the two, and many do, and of course people are free to mod and adjust my mod to suit their tastes, and the game settings and settings.txt can easily be used to make major adjustments.

As for some of your specific points:

* SE4 isn't galactic in scale. Even if you use a 255-system quadrant, which is a HUGE game from a gameplay perspective, 255 systems isn't very much of a galaxy. Drive out away from city lights on a clear night and check out the sky. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon12.gif One estimate of the number of stars in our own galaxy is 100 BILLION (100,000,000,000). This would probably take very many SE4 turns to colonize. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon12.gif

* SE4 is a game with roughly month-long turns, individual spaceships (and satellites, and fighters) which resolves combat down to the single weapon shot, and so on. It can take an hour or more to play each turn later in the game. The game generally starts with players having a homeworld and zero units. It's not really reasonable and realistic, if you take the time-scale literally, to expect to be able to conquer and colonize to the extent that the unmodded game set allows, in any playable amount of time. The unmodded game does allow players to fully develop and conquer a large quadrant in a matter of decades. Proportions doesn't. That's "by design." You can still have very interesting expansion and conflict in Proportions, and you could conquer and dominate all of the other players. You probably won't ever build a cutural center, but you're not supposed to. Cultural centers represent more than just the industry and physical structure of a civilization. You CAN multiply your production and research capacity through colonization, eventually. However, even that isn't necessarily required to dominate a quadrant.

* Since the time frame of a game of SE4 is limited to a few decades of game time (unless you say the turns are actually a year long, or something), what you can expect in Proportions is to be able to establish a few pretty large colonies and a fairly large number of outPosts, but to have to decide how much effort to devote to developing those, and how much to develop a military force. There can still be large-scale conflicts, and there generally are. But there is much less necessity to do lightning colonization and expand or become quickly insignifigant.

Some of the design goals of Proportions include:

http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon7.gif To allow the game to continue with interesting goals and technologies to discover, even after many decades of play. Most technologies should usually not be researched to their highest levels, and most colonies should still have room to improve (and remain inferior to a homeworld) even after many decades.

http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon7.gif Late in the game, the remaining undamaged homeworlds should still be the most powerful planets, but there should be some very valuable and formidable colonies. However, most planets should still be either uncolonized, or relatively undeveloped, compared to the highly populated and developed colonies. That is, if a colony is started but no particular effort is made to develop it (mainly by shipping a bunch of population there), it shouldn't have developed into a major colony just because some years have passed without any particular effort to build it up - i.e., it takes deliberate effort (population transport) to create a major colony.

PvK

Mylon

September 25th, 2002, 04:15 PM

Why don't you just say cultural world centers aren't meant to be built at all and leave it at that? Sure, a homeworld that leaves all of its building to base space yards could maybe start turning a space port/resupply depot into a cultural world center from the second turn and it might actually see it done before the end game, but even then it would be pretty impracitcal as would take a huge number turns _after_ being built to make up for their huge cost through mineral production, research points, intel points, ect...

Even on ringworlds were conditions are always optimal and one really can drive a unmodified Honda (well, you'll still need paved roads) around, accomplishing such a task is nearly impossible.

Thinking in purely game mechanics (which, in my opinion have more say that realism, because if I wanted realism I'd play more real life), Cultural world centers are wasteful to build. Starting off with a bunch is a nice bonus, but to build one would lock a good planet's production for 500 turns and require an insane amount of resources, thus making them unpractical.

And, from another standpoint, consider that America was a colony some 300 years ago or so. People brought their culture with them and built rather quickly, about as much as population would allow. The two factors that limited America's growth were population and technology. Look how fast things grew when the railroads were built. Colonists don't loose their culture merely because they no longer are around their own culture, so if you bring along enough colonists then culture by itself is certain not a problem. The infrastructure (on the level of compactness as the colony world center) would be difficult, but you even noted how it can be done in 27 turns.

PvK

September 25th, 2002, 09:31 PM

Originally posted by Mylon:
Why don't you just say cultural world centers aren't meant to be built at all and leave it at that?
Good question. If I didn't mention that yet, I don't remember why. I've said it on several other threads in the past.

Sure, a homeworld that leaves all of its building to base space yards could maybe start turning a space port/resupply depot into a cultural world center from the second turn and it might actually see it done before the end game, but even then it would be pretty impracitcal as would take a huge number turns _after_ being built to make up for their huge cost through mineral production, research points, intel points, ect...Yep. I guess I figured people would realize this as soon as they saw their homeworld reporting 100 years to build one, and colonies reporting "Never" to build one. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon12.gif

Even on ringworlds were conditions are always optimal and one really can drive a unmodified Honda (well, you'll still need paved roads) around, accomplishing such a task is nearly impossible.
Within a few decades, yes, as intended.

Thinking in purely game mechanics (which, in my opinion have more say that realism, because if I wanted realism I'd play more real life), Cultural world centers are wasteful to build. Starting off with a bunch is a nice bonus, but to build one would lock a good planet's production for 500 turns and require an insane amount of resources, thus making them unpractical.
Yes, quite so. Creating a new culture is not a practical path for the relatively short period of conflict and exploration represented by an SE4 game.

And, from another standpoint, consider that America was a colony some 300 years ago or so. People brought their culture with them and built rather quickly, about as much as population would allow. The two factors that limited America's growth were population and technology. Look how fast things grew when the railroads were built. Colonists don't loose their culture merely because they no longer are around their own culture, so if you bring along enough colonists then culture by itself is certain not a problem. The infrastructure (on the level of compactness as the colony world center) would be difficult, but you even noted how it can be done in 27 turns.Sure, but again, what culture did they bring? European culture. They effectively destroyed the existing culture of the existing population, brought their own European culture, and developed it a bit, and built lots of housing and infrastructure, over the span of 300 years and with hundreds of millions of people and untold millions of tons of machinery and materials. They consumed many times their own mass in organic materials, massive amounts of energy and mineral resources, etc. The conditions were ideal.

I'm not sure I've clearly explained the difference between culture and industry. I don't think it can be directly modelled in SE4, but Proportions is my best shot at an abstraction of it within the limits of that game system.

I do allow building industry at a very generous rate (you can build the productive capacity of a cultural center on a colony world in well under 5 years, given enough population and facility slots). The reason I have this take up much more space is to represent the difficulty of building net-efficient infrastructure on inhospitable alien worlds. Cultural Centers offer much more concentrated (on a fac slot basis) production largely because of the native conditions, but also because of cultural, logistical, and infrastructure considerations.

In addition to all of that, however, cultural centers represent many necessary elements that are not physical and can't be physically mass-produced and duplicated for a multiplicative effect, the way the game program would do if I made the build costs less. As I've mentioned below at least twice, reasearch facilities really should not add their points together, and should not be shiftable every turn to concentrate on whatever project the Emperor wants. Also, the ability to get billions of intelligent and educated people to work towards a common goal requires an outstanding culture with very impressive social structures, government, religion, system of raising and educating children, economic systems, and all of the other human activities that make these things worthwhile and possible in the first place: arts, music, literature, philosophy, romance, entertainment, communities, toys, crafts, sports, fashion, cuisine, tradition, lore, and many others. It can't be duplicated by droids overnight. You may be able to duplicate the same stuff (see Wall-Mart, McDonalds, Safeway, pop music, Twinkies, pulp fiction, Hollywood spin-offs, "Next Generation" TV shows, etc...), but that's mostly just repeating existing cultural works. "You already have a similar quadrant-wide ability."

PvK

jimbob

September 26th, 2002, 12:54 AM

(see Wall-Mart, McDonalds, Safeway, pop music, Twinkies, pulp fiction, Hollywood spin-offs, "Next Generation" TV shows, etc...), but that's mostly just repeating existing cultural works.Heretic! Wal-Mart IS culture.
Repent or we will grind you up and make you into McNuggets.

Mylon

September 26th, 2002, 04:34 PM

Yes, it may have taken America 300 years to get where we have today, but also consider:

1) It isn't a set thing. You can't say 300 years alter America has finally achieved "cultural center" status. Whos to say they didn't achieve it with the invent of the automobile? Or the railroads?
2) Production is skewed by the fact that only one thing can be produced at a time. Such infrastructure as a city doesn't spring up overnight, but it also isn't the only focus of the people.
3) Cost is also skewed because colonies are self sustaining in nature. True, America has maybe consumed its own weight in organics, but sustaining the colonists is free in SEIV because they produce enough naturally to take care of themselves. It is production facilities or other things that cost extra.
4) They're also evolving things. It would be reasonable that if a new mining technique is discovered you shouldn't have to build half of the cultural center over again just to refine one part. The 50% cost factor may be unavoidable, but the tremendus cost of that very 50% assures that it will never happen (assuming multiple levels of cultural facilities).

dogscoff

September 26th, 2002, 05:43 PM

1) It isn't a set thing. You can't say 300 years alter America has finally achieved "cultural center" status. Whos to say they didn't achieve it with the invent of the automobile? Or the railroads?
Who's to say they acheived it at all?

*Dogscoff falls over laughing while all the Americans present pelt him with half-eaten Big Macs...

PvK

September 26th, 2002, 10:30 PM

Originally posted by Mylon:
Yes, it may have taken America 300 years to get where we have today, but also consider:

1) It isn't a set thing. You can't say 300 years alter America has finally achieved "cultural center" status. Whos to say they didn't achieve it with the invent of the automobile? Or the railroads?
Since I defined cultural centers, I would say that the automobile would be a tech level achievement, not a facility, and that railroads were just part of the transportation infrastructure. They don't have that much to do with culture, although they may be a part of it, affect it, and certainly they would never have appeared without an advanced (essentially, European) civilization. I would say that building more than two facilities on a colony, or building a large facility like a resource production "complex", probably does involve developing a lot of transportation infrastructure, including the space-age equivalents of automobiles and railroads. These also will require tremendous amounts of design and engineering to develop survivable and effective Versions customized to operate in each planetary environment.

However, your question seems to be from a perspective that is still missing what I've been trying to explain about what culture is, and why there are cultural center facilities, and why they can't be built quickly. It's not that you couldn't, with a huge amount of work and materials, build the infrastructure of a civilized continent in a couple of decades. It's just that this would not be well represented by another cultural center facility in SE4. This is because culture contributes things that the duplication of does not result in an additive effect, the way the SE4 game engine would add them together. 1000 scientists will not develop the same technology 10 times as quickly as 100 scientists working from the same principles. Not to mention that building a bunch of lab space on a distant planet is not going to have an direct additive effect, either. Who here believes that in the future, we won't have enough real estate for all the science labs we need, and that by colonizing Mars and filling it with science labs, we could triple the rate of human scientific accomplishment, compared to having the labs and scientists stay on Earth with the same budget?

And that's only the research part.

2) Production is skewed by the fact that only one thing can be produced at a time. Such infrastructure as a city doesn't spring up overnight, but it also isn't the only focus of the people.
Yes, that's very true. Unfortunately for the golden ideal of completely accurate simulation, that's the way SE4 production works.

3) Cost is also skewed because colonies are self sustaining in nature. True, America has maybe consumed its own weight in organics, but sustaining the colonists is free in SEIV because they produce enough naturally to take care of themselves. It is production facilities or other things that cost extra.
Also true, and again, unfortunately there's no great way to do this in SE4 except to give the facilities large costs, or possibly to give them negative resource production (though this latter idea is marred by the obligatory multiplication by planet value).

4) They're also evolving things. It would be reasonable that if a new mining technique is discovered you shouldn't have to build half of the cultural center over again just to refine one part. The 50% cost factor may be unavoidable, but the tremendus cost of that very 50% assures that it will never happen (assuming multiple levels of cultural facilities).Yep. Although, what you can do is build other facilities from the higher tech on the same planet, such as robotoid facotories, value improvement plants, computer complexes, etc. These have multiplicative effects with whatever else is on the planet, and don't have to have massive costs. This is probably what I should add more of, rather than struggling with the cost/upgrade system provided by SE4, which doesn't leave me much flexibility beyond what I've already done.

PvK

Graeme Dice

October 14th, 2002, 07:19 AM

It seems to me from this statement, and from what you've said before, that you see an SE4 colony as simply a military/industrial or research complex. In that case, sure, I agree. That's why I have the population curve for production set to sharply curve at a very low number like this. Yes, you only need a few million people, or even droids, if you just want to operate, say, resource extraction facilities, and it won't do all that much poorer than a planet with 4 billion people and the same facilities.It will produce significantly less material resources when it should be producing significantly more due to the fact that the planet is untouched. There has not been several thousand years of resource depletion to cause the planet to be producing a shadow of its former resources.

Where we differ, is that you seem to think that that is all that can be done with a planet, or that terraforming and civilizing are trivial and pointless additions. My opinion is that developing a planet from a workshop into a homeworld equivalent evolves many orders of magnitude more. The return on investment is much more shallow, though the potential per planet is eventually greater.No, I think that such development will occur as a natural part of the colonization process, and that it will happen quickly and painlesly enough that it doesn't really need to be considered as a major expenditure.

I'm not questioning whether it appens at all, but the extent and proportions to which it happens, and the costs, effects, and time involved. Personally, I don't think, for example, that say, Oxford University's contribution to the advancement of Earth's technology and other intellectual fields (yes, there are many others) would be doubled if we could only find another few square Km somewhere to build a replica. Do you? Oxford's contributions to technology in the Last decade have been miniscule when compared to all the contributions from every other research lab.

For another example, suppose we find a really rich iron or even petrolium deposit on Mars - how cost-effective do you think it's going to be to develop an extraction plant and transport infrastructure to take advantage of this?I think that the transport infrastructure will be essentially free. Send an automated robot team to an asteroid with a higher than average concentration of iron and nickel with some water in the vicinity if possible. Have them build a fusion engine with the materials found there, and push the asteroid into orbit where you build a space elevator. Bring some more ice asteroids into orbit for fuel for the fusion engines you are constructing to strap onto mineral packets. The only expenditure is the initial cost to build the robots because you have essentially unlimited resources to work with.

How many years did it take to develop the unmanned probe to Mars that crashed because someone had a math error converting Imperial units to Metric, and how much did that cost?It cost only around $150 million dollars, and took less than five years to develop. By the time a SE4 game starts, the people have faster than light drives, and spaceships that can travel across solar systems with a full crew within a single month. Their level of technology is far, far ahead of ours.

That's a huge over-simplification, it seems to me. For just a few examples:

You need to develop a pressure dome that can withstand the particular conditions of that environment, meaning you have to find out exactly what that environment is like (pressure, temperature, chemical effects, weather phenomena and patterns, volcanic activity, indigenous life forms), meaning you have to guess and then establish an outpost to conduct research, then develop and produce the dome and required life support for it.That would be why it takes 500,000 research points to obtain a colonization technology. Sure the research might take a while, but once it's been done once it doesn't need to be done again.

(For example, it took Earth eleven years and ten probes to get Venera 8 to operate on the surface of Venus. Two years later, Venera 9, and three years later, Venera 10, each succeeded in returning single photographs, before the specially-designed-to-survive probes were destroyed after about 50 minutes each. That was 1975. Since the first probe attempt in 1961, it's been 41 years [~410 SE4 turns], and we still haven't landed anyone on Venus or Mars, let alone planned to build Hondas there.)The probes Lasted for only 50 minutes because the electronics of the day couldn't survive at those kinds of temperatures. Now we have chips that can survive at 200 degrees Celsius indefinitely. Venus is around 462 degrees C, so give us a few more decades and we'll have chips that can survive there. Of course, by the time we have FTL drives and ships with the lowest tech propulsion systems of proportions, we will be around the year 3000 ourselves.

Then, your Earth-based factory is not a self-contained unit. It takes advantage of Earth infrastructure such as power plants, communications, plumbing, the availability of parts and materials, not to mention the necessities for human life (housing, food, and incentive for people to exist near the factory), and transportation networks (roads, trucks, rails, ships, harbors) to deliver the goods to somewhere useful.Humans are only necessary for an automobile plant because the robots currently need someone to supervise them, and because it's bad politics to fully automate production. Give us 1000 years, and we'll be building fully automated production facilities. As for the infrastructure, most of it is unnecessary when you have a tiny population. For communications inside a solar system, you need a kilowatt to megawatt transceiver, which an amateur radio operator can build out of catalog parts. For power, you use the core of your colonization ship, after all, if it can push a megaton across a planetary system in five to ten months, it will produce enough power to run a rather large city.

Another example of a major obstacle is going to be climate and atmosphere. So you've got a dome - how do you maintain an Earthlike atmosphere and conditions inside it, considering you want to run a factory complex inside it? This is a non-issue if you have a water supply anywhere in the system. With free electricity from fusion plants (and antimatter and quantum reactors in SE4), all you need is a bunch of water to produce as much oxygen as you need. If you don't breath oxygen, then you use some other reaction. Burn things to produce CO2, skim gas giants for H2, or pump it out for none.

Another consideration is that building Hondas on Venus isn't going to help Earth unless there is storage and a transportation system in place, and if it's not more efficient than just building another factory on Earth, then it's a net loss. Getting the materials to Venus, and getting the Hondas back from Venus, is surely going to cost huge amounts in rocket fuel and other space transportation expenses.You don't transport raw materials to a colony, they use what's already there and send it back to the mother planet. For transportation, all you need are a bunch of water/rock asteroids with fusion engines built on them and automated control centres. You have an essentially infinite fuel supply, and no maintenance costs.

Even these are just a few examples - the specifics would be much more complex and daunting, not to mention expensive and time-consuming. Perhaps not insurmountable, eventually, but certainly not trivial, nor the sort of thing that can be accomplished in a month, without any overhead costs.Not a month certainly, but definetly within a decade, and while producing a net profit at the same time. A new colony should have a net research boost to the whole civilization immediately, as it is inventing the technologies necessary to sustain itself.

[/QUOTE]I guess I wasn't clear. When I wrote "especially if the planet is years away from your civilization even in the fastest ships your empire can produce", that was just a reference to the way SE4 doesn't take distance into acount when figuring empire revenues from colonies. A colony on the far side of the quadrant will contribute just as much to the imperial coffers as one in the home system. However, I didn't mean to say that travel time was the only determining factor in colony production. Even if it were, imagine if SE4 tracked expenses not just for warships but for transports for resources. Even a standard game Escort with a couple of cargo bays is pretty expensive to maintain, and that accounting is highly simplified. I'm not saying that's an accurate representation of costs, but still, it shows the sort of thing I was talking about. If you had to build and maintain escorts to move the resources produced by the colonies, you could see how it could quickly become expensive or even counter-productive to try to build an economy spread out across many solar systems.[/quote]

That's because you don't build military capable ships to haul cargo. You take entire asteroids, or something similar, hollow them out and use the materials to build the engines, stick a computerized brain in them, add water, and let them travel along hauling resources around. SE4 works on an accrual basis, resources are counted as soon as they are produced, no matter how long it takes to get them to the location they are needed.

Military ships have to be able to accelerate quickly, which requires balanced designs. They need materials which can handle the high stresses of combat maneuvers, advanced weaponry, and most expensive of all, a highly trained crew. Cargo ships require an engine and somewhere to strap the stuff you want to carry.

[/QUOTE]As I've said many times on previous threads, and I think on this one too, I don't think it makes any sense to equate planet slots directly to surface area, and hopefully it's obvious that Proportions' facilities do not all represent items that take up the same amount of space. Only the cultural centers are described as continental in size. The facilities just represent facilities, whereas the complexes are complexes of many facilities, but even the Megacomplexes would not, I think, require continental areas. What I do think they require is environment research and development, infrastructure, life support, etc etc. It seems to me, as I've discussed at length, that there are major obstacles and requirements to overcome before a net gain to the empire is achieved. These are (very abstractly) represented in Proportions by the construction costs and the population construction rate curve.[/quote]

It seems to me though, that the costs involved with creating a colony in proportions far outstrip what they would be in actuality, especially for worlds that have breathable atmospheres.

[/QUOTE]Just because a planet has the same basic type of atmosphere as your native atmosphere, doesn't make it breathable. Suppose Venus had an Oxygen-Nitrogen atmosphere. Let's be very generous and say it's even about the same proportion of gasses, and there are no toxic particles or other components. Great, but Venus surface atmosphere is 100 x Earth's pressure, and 600-700 degrees Celsius.[/quote]

Utterly wrong. If Venus had the same atmospheric composition as Earth it would have a surface temperature just slightly greater than ours because there would be no runaway greenhouse effect. Many of the gases would condense at the same time and reduce the atmospheric pressure to a more manageable level.

Instantly pressure-cooked before anyone can say "Honda." Sounds like a great place to build a new civilization. It should only take a couple of years, right?For a planet to have the same type of atmosphere as your home planet it would almost certainly have a similar type of environment. For example, an atmosphere with free oxygen requires photosynthesis or some other chemical reaction to keep the highly corrosive oxygen from doing what it has already done to Mars.

Ok, so you're saying the actual people can be few, because they can control robots who do the actual work. That seems reasonable, but I would say it would be represented by population units in the game.Then the rate of growth is far too low, and should be well over 10-20% per year, because robots don't require two decades to mature.

How much of a population unit is actual people, and how much is droids and equiment and supplies and so on, is abstracted. So how much machinery, equipment, supplies, and machinery are you expecting to need? It too is going to need fuel and spare parts and other materials. Just exploring and studying the environment is going to take a long time, not to mention designing and engineering solutions.If you can live easily in space, then you can live in just about any other environment that exists, unless the atmospheric pressure is too high, or it badly corrodes your hull materials. Any other situation is no more difficult to survive than a vacuum.

[/QUOTE]A Proportions mine facility does not represent a continent-sized mine. If I were to add a continent-sized mine facility, well, it'd cost a lot more than my MegaComplexes do. The megacomplexes I do have represent less industry than a cultural center contains, and they produce up to 750 units/turn.[/quote]

I still think you are far overestimating the need for population to run such things. We only use our population for many things on Earth because it is so high and because unemployment is politically bad.

Now, it's true that a Proportions robo - miner component can produce up to 800 units/turn, but they also have maintenance costs, including the time to get to the destination, which almost require such a high rate or they won't produce a net gain at all. A mineral base can be built in three turns that will produce 5000 minerals at an asteroid and cost about 500 maintenance a turn.

Anyway, thanks a lot for the discussion and feedback (both to you and everyone who's given feedback).Remember that I'm just airing complaints that more relate to my view of colonization than actual problems within proportions. I think that it's one of the better mods out there, although it does push the limits of usability of the game interface with the massive amounts of base spaceyards that the homeworld can support.

It's good enough that I'm using the basic concept of slow development (with huge payoff at the end however) for a few of the races in my own crossover mod.

oleg

October 14th, 2002, 04:49 PM

"Oxford's contributions to technology in the Last decade have been miniscule when compared to all the contributions from every other research lab."

Im sorry, but you missed PvK' point completely.

Graeme Dice

October 14th, 2002, 11:08 PM

Originally posted by oleg:
"Oxford's contributions to technology in the Last decade have been miniscule when compared to all the contributions from every other research lab."

Im sorry, but you missed PvK' point completely.Not really. His point was that creating a duplicate of Oxford would not double total research output. My rebuttal was that you wouldn't create a duplicate of Oxford, you'd take that much area and create a brand new research lab. When properly funded and directed it would not work on the problems that are mostly the same as those at existing labs, and would thereby increase research by an amount commesurate to its sizer and resource allotment.

oleg

October 15th, 2002, 04:46 AM

There is a law of diminishingreturn: If you put twice as much money into R&D you will not double output. In developed society, making second lab with the same budget as Oxford will not create such a good University.

Mylon

October 15th, 2002, 05:54 PM

The idea behind linear input/output relationship is that two labs can focus on two totally different subjects, yet their efforts will apply to the same project. For example, when researching gas colonizers, one lab can focus on the materials designed to make up the landing gear, another lab can design the landing gear and its mechanical properties, another lab can perform experimental tests given data from the first two labs, and this can likewise be reproduced with the many, many parts involved in the entire colonization. Thus, labs can add linearly, since they are not exactly focus on the exact same project. I agree that two labs working on the exact same project would not double the rate of production, but the idea is that there are many parts to each technology that can be split up so that each lab gets one part. Armor, for another example, can be involved with the labs that design the possible materials to be used, the many labs to test those materials against the many weapons or conditions it will have to face, then there's the lab(s) that concentrate on effective placement of armor on hulls to maximize effectiveness.

PvK

October 22nd, 2002, 06:56 AM

Yes, it is true that two labs can work on two different subjects, and one tech area may consist of multiple subjects, so some additive research, but only up to a point. Once again, the proportions presented are inaccurate, and this mod attempts to compensate.

The thing is, even one homeworld is NEVER going to "run out of space" for places for people to study all of the subjects they want to.

The limits on technological development are mostly a matter of culture, society, and education. Real estate has almost nothing to do with the rate of scientific progress.

PvK

PvK

October 22nd, 2002, 08:44 AM

Graeme, your message is sooo long...

Originally posted by Graeme Dice:
<blockquote>quote:<hr />It seems to me from this statement, and from what you've said before, that you see an SE4 colony as simply a military/industrial or research complex. In that case, sure, I agree. That's why I have the population curve for production set to sharply curve at a very low number like this. Yes, you only need a few million people, or even droids, if you just want to operate, say, resource extraction facilities, and it won't do all that much poorer than a planet with 4 billion people and the same facilities.It will produce significantly less material resources when it should be producing significantly more due to the fact that the planet is untouched. There has not been several thousand years of resource depletion to cause the planet to be producing a shadow of its former resources.
<hr /></blockquote>

Well, clearly, we disagree. I think it depends on the idiocy of the species, how much they become self-reliant on certain resources, and then mess them up. However, if they survive to spacefaring status, then I think they will be able to figure out how to maintain sustainable resources of all three types in their home environment. That being the case, I don't see anyone "using up" a whole planet. If they do, then they don't make it to functioning spacefaring status.

So, it seems to me that resource production will be more a matter of how much infrastructure can be developed in one place. Obviously, to me anyway, this place is going to be the homeworld. Resources aren't just base materials as will be found on alien planets. In order to build high-tech items, you don't just need minerals, organics, and rads - you need manufactured goods, the efficiency of producing which is highly determined by the network of resources and conditions found on a homeworld.

<blockquote>quote:<hr />Where we differ, is that you seem to think that that is all that can be done with a planet, or that terraforming and civilizing are trivial and pointless additions. My opinion is that developing a planet from a workshop into a homeworld equivalent evolves many orders of magnitude more. The return on investment is much more shallow, though the potential per planet is eventually greater.No, I think that such development will occur as a natural part of the colonization process, and that it will happen quickly and painlesly enough that it doesn't really need to be considered as a major expenditure.
<hr /></blockquote>

Well again, we disagree. I think you're oversimplifying, and not considering many problems which will take serious amounts of time to develop. Developing technology, even in completely understood conditions on a home planet completely supported by infrastructure, takes time. And, it seems to me there would be millions of issues in trying to convert an alien planet into a homeworld-equivalent.

<blockquote>quote:<hr />I'm not questioning whether it appens at all, but the extent and proportions to which it happens, and the costs, effects, and time involved. Personally, I don't think, for example, that say, Oxford University's contribution to the advancement of Earth's technology and other intellectual fields (yes, there are many others) would be doubled if we could only find another few square Km somewhere to build a replica. Do you? Oxford's contributions to technology in the Last decade have been miniscule when compared to all the contributions from every other research lab.
<hr /></blockquote>

Perhaps if you look at it as just a lab. However, that wasn't my point - you're looking at my question upside-down. What I was trying to say, is that a civilization only manages to raise so much novel thought and invention per year, mostly by the top fringe of its intellectual elite. An excellent educational system, and a gathering of minds to educate the best students in the best way, is a product of the culture as a whole, and is made possible, protected, and nurtured, by social factors built up over centuries, and which have essentially nothing to do with finding more space on alien planets to build labs.

<blockquote>quote:<hr />For another example, suppose we find a really rich iron or even petrolium deposit on Mars - how cost-effective do you think it's going to be to develop an extraction plant and transport infrastructure to take advantage of this?I think that the transport infrastructure will be essentially free. Send an automated robot team to an asteroid with a higher than average concentration of iron and nickel with some water in the vicinity if possible. Have them build a fusion engine with the materials found there, and push the asteroid into orbit where you build a space elevator. Bring some more ice asteroids into orbit for fuel for the fusion engines you are constructing to strap onto mineral packets. The only expenditure is the initial cost to build the robots because you have essentially unlimited resources to work with.
<hr /></blockquote>

Well, clearly our assumptions vary widely. For example, I don't see "cornucopia fusion power from water" as a basic tech in SE4. If it were so easy to generate power, what are supplies and the Quantum Reactor all about in SE4? I think you are describing a much higher tech level in these things than SE4's tech tree represents. Of course, a mod that made such assumptions (and I think you are making many assumptions about the tech abilities besides just fusion power) would be perfectly legitimate - it's just not what I imagined when I thought about Proportions mod.

<blockquote>quote:<hr /> How many years did it take to develop the unmanned probe to Mars that crashed because someone had a math error converting Imperial units to Metric, and how much did that cost?It cost only around $150 million dollars, and took less than five years to develop. By the time a SE4 game starts, the people have faster than light drives, and spaceships that can travel across solar systems with a full crew within a single month. Their level of technology is far, far ahead of ours.
<hr /></blockquote>

Well, again, your imagination of SE4's tech levels is simply much higher than mine. For example, I don't see SE4 as starting with FTL drives. Light takes EIGHT MINUTES to get from the Sun to the Earth. An SE4 turn is about a month. So, light speed in SE4 would be oh, probably well over 1000, not 6 (ion engine speed in SE4).

<blockquote>quote:<hr />That's a huge over-simplification, it seems to me. For just a few examples:

You need to develop a pressure dome that can withstand the particular conditions of that environment, meaning you have to find out exactly what that environment is like (pressure, temperature, chemical effects, weather phenomena and patterns, volcanic activity, indigenous life forms), meaning you have to guess and then establish an outpost to conduct research, then develop and produce the dome and required life support for it.That would be why it takes 500,000 research points to obtain a colonization technology. Sure the research might take a while, but once it's been done once it doesn't need to be done again.
<hr /></blockquote>

Again, I disagree. At least, at the tech levels I imagine. Each planet's environment is quite a bit different. Atmosphere composition is just one of many, many factors.

<blockquote>quote:<hr /> (For example, it took Earth eleven years and ten probes to get Venera 8 to operate on the surface of Venus. Two years later, Venera 9, and three years later, Venera 10, each succeeded in returning single photographs, before the specially-designed-to-survive probes were destroyed after about 50 minutes each. That was 1975. Since the first probe attempt in 1961, it's been 41 years [~410 SE4 turns], and we still haven't landed anyone on Venus or Mars, let alone planned to build Hondas there.)The probes Lasted for only 50 minutes because the electronics of the day couldn't survive at those kinds of temperatures. Now we have chips that can survive at 200 degrees Celsius indefinitely. Venus is around 462 degrees C, so give us a few more decades and we'll have chips that can survive there. Of course, by the time we have FTL drives and ships with the lowest tech propulsion systems of proportions, we will be around the year 3000 ourselves.
<hr /></blockquote>

Just because you can make a chip to survive in an environment, after years of research, doesn't make it cost-effective, or not require separate research and development times thousands of different projects.

See the "we're imagining different tech levels", and "no, SE4 propulsion is not FTL" issues. To me, that would be true only after an appropriately long period of extension to the SE4 tech tree.

<blockquote>quote:<hr /> Then, your Earth-based factory is not a self-contained unit. It takes advantage of Earth infrastructure such as power plants, communications, plumbing, the availability of parts and materials, not to mention the necessities for human life (housing, food, and incentive for people to exist near the factory), and transportation networks (roads, trucks, rails, ships, harbors) to deliver the goods to somewhere useful.Humans are only necessary for an automobile plant because the robots currently need someone to supervise them, and because it's bad politics to fully automate production. Give us 1000 years, and we'll be building fully automated production facilities. As for the infrastructure, most of it is unnecessary when you have a tiny population. For communications inside a solar system, you need a kilowatt to megawatt transceiver, which an amateur radio operator can build out of catalog parts. For power, you use the core of your colonization ship, after all, if it can push a megaton across a planetary system in five to ten months, it will produce enough power to run a rather large city.
<hr /></blockquote>

Again, ok, you can redefine population as mostly non-organic droids, but that's just an abstraction. You still need something to be able to perform a massive range of tasks, including self-support and survival in an unexplored environment. You still need power, transportation, and tons of specialized equipment and materials. Using mostly robotic personnel may solve some problems, but it introduces others. You need less food and medicine, but more power, batteries, lubricants, maintenance facilities, and spare parts, etc. If you think this can all be made from chain-reaction factories and built up from rocks, well, I think you're describing year 3000 (or year 4000) technology again.

<blockquote>quote:<hr /> Another example of a major obstacle is going to be climate and atmosphere. So you've got a dome - how do you maintain an Earthlike atmosphere and conditions inside it, considering you want to run a factory complex inside it? This is a non-issue if you have a water supply anywhere in the system. With free electricity from fusion plants (and antimatter and quantum reactors in SE4), all you need is a bunch of water to produce as much oxygen as you need. If you don't breath oxygen, then you use some other reaction. Burn things to produce CO2, skim gas giants for H2, or pump it out for none.
<hr /></blockquote>

Well, I disagree that it's a non-issue, at least without serious tech development. Atmospheric manipulation would be a tech area, as would fusion power, pollution and temperature control, etc.

<blockquote>quote:<hr />Another consideration is that building Hondas on Venus isn't going to help Earth unless there is storage and a transportation system in place, and if it's not more efficient than just building another factory on Earth, then it's a net loss. Getting the materials to Venus, and getting the Hondas back from Venus, is surely going to cost huge amounts in rocket fuel and other space transportation expenses.You don't transport raw materials to a colony, they use what's already there and send it back to the mother planet. For transportation, all you need are a bunch of water/rock asteroids with fusion engines built on them and automated control centres. You have an essentially infinite fuel supply, and no maintenance costs.
<hr /></blockquote>

Well, a Honda factory on Earth already has the benefits of massive amounts of infrastructure for producing steel, alluminum, pLastics, spare parts, etc etc etc. You will have to either ship all such things to Venus, or build equivalent infrastructure, and the required environment for it to survive, on Venus, just to run the Honda plant. All of that is massively non-trivial, at least before year 3000-4000. Irradiated red-hot iron ore, assuming you can find it, is thousands or millions of steps away from being snapped together into a Honda. Meanwhile, Earth has an iron core, and is probably, it seems to me, far more convenient, in a thousand or more ways.

<blockquote>quote:<hr /> Even these are just a few examples - the specifics would be much more complex and daunting, not to mention expensive and time-consuming. Perhaps not insurmountable, eventually, but certainly not trivial, nor the sort of thing that can be accomplished in a month, without any overhead costs.Not a month certainly, but definetly within a decade, and while producing a net profit at the same time. A new colony should have a net research boost to the whole civilization immediately, as it is inventing the technologies necessary to sustain itself.
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Well, at year 3000, maybe.

<blockquote>quote:<hr />I guess I wasn't clear. When I wrote "especially if the planet is years away from your civilization even in the fastest ships your empire can produce", that was just a reference to the way SE4 doesn't take distance into acount when figuring empire revenues from colonies. A colony on the far side of the quadrant will contribute just as much to the imperial coffers as one in the home system. However, I didn't mean to say that travel time was the only determining factor in colony production. Even if it were, imagine if SE4 tracked expenses not just for warships but for transports for resources. Even a standard game Escort with a couple of cargo bays is pretty expensive to maintain, and that accounting is highly simplified. I'm not saying that's an accurate representation of costs, but still, it shows the sort of thing I was talking about. If you had to build and maintain escorts to move the resources produced by the colonies, you could see how it could quickly become expensive or even counter-productive to try to build an economy spread out across many solar systems.That's because you don't build military capable ships to haul cargo. You take entire asteroids, or something similar, hollow them out and use the materials to build the engines, stick a computerized brain in them, add water, and let them travel along hauling resources around. SE4 works on an accrual basis, resources are counted as soon as they are produced, no matter how long it takes to get them to the location they are needed.
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If you have such technologies, maybe. Maybe by year 4000.

Military ships have to be able to accelerate quickly, which requires balanced designs. They need materials which can handle the high stresses of combat maneuvers, advanced weaponry, and most expensive of all, a highly trained crew. Cargo ships require an engine and somewhere to strap the stuff you want to carry.

<blockquote>quote:<hr />As I've said many times on previous threads, and I think on this one too, I don't think it makes any sense to equate planet slots directly to surface area, and hopefully it's obvious that Proportions' facilities do not all represent items that take up the same amount of space. Only the cultural centers are described as continental in size. The facilities just represent facilities, whereas the complexes are complexes of many facilities, but even the Megacomplexes would not, I think, require continental areas. What I do think they require is environment research and development, infrastructure, life support, etc etc. It seems to me, as I've discussed at length, that there are major obstacles and requirements to overcome before a net gain to the empire is achieved. These are (very abstractly) represented in Proportions by the construction costs and the population construction rate curve.It seems to me though, that the costs involved with creating a colony in proportions far outstrip what they would be in actuality, especially for worlds that have breathable atmospheres.
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Given your assumptions, I might say the same thing, but again, it sounds to me like you're 600-2000 years ahead of the techs I'm imagining.

Even so, though, I still think planetary conditions would be major economic disincentives. Atmosphere composition would be only one thing. Gravity, radiation, pressure, temperature, volcanic activity, meteor activity, weather activity, indigenous life, indigenous microbes, would all present seriously expensive obstacles.

The few planets that might actually be somewhat hospitable would be massively more valuable, because of the reduced expense of needing to develop specialized technology.

Moreover, given the size of a planet, I don't see any development effort actually "running out of space" within even a hundred years.

Due to the complementary nature, and the complexity, of high-tech infrastructure found on a fully-civilized planet, I don't see alien colonies quickly reaching homeworld-challenging abilities even at very high tech levels. Again, only possibly with massively advanced technology, and even then, it would take signifigant time.

<blockquote>quote:<hr />Just because a planet has the same basic type of atmosphere as your native atmosphere, doesn't make it breathable. Suppose Venus had an Oxygen-Nitrogen atmosphere. Let's be very generous and say it's even about the same proportion of gasses, and there are no toxic particles or other components. Great, but Venus surface atmosphere is 100 x Earth's pressure, and 600-700 degrees Celsius.Utterly wrong. If Venus had the same atmospheric composition as Earth it would have a surface temperature just slightly greater than ours because there would be no runaway greenhouse effect. Many of the gases would condense at the same time and reduce the atmospheric pressure to a more manageable level.
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Not utterly wrong. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon12.gif You're over-simplifying again, as does SE4. There are not just a handful of possible atmospheric compositions, or conditions. It wouldn't take a whole lot to make even the Earth's atmosphere unbreathable. Just add radiation, or a large meteor strike, or massive pollution, etc. Not to mention alien planets, where the planet's size and relation to its sun would generally be massively different, etc.

<blockquote>quote:<hr /> Instantly pressure-cooked before anyone can say "Honda." Sounds like a great place to build a new civilization. It should only take a couple of years, right?For a planet to have the same type of atmosphere as your home planet it would almost certainly have a similar type of environment. For example, an atmosphere with free oxygen requires photosynthesis or some other chemical reaction to keep the highly corrosive oxygen from doing what it has already done to Mars.
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It seems to me you're reasoning backwards, again. How many of the planets we know of have an Earthlike atmospheric composition? Zero. Starting from SE4's assumption that there are only a few atmosphere types for any planet, is just a fudge for gameplay purposes. Or, maybe a following of pulp fantasy trends. Anyway, I think there is massive room for interpretation in all of this. Star Trek would be one extreme "Sir, another Earth-like planet with humanoids on it...", and reality, perhaps, another. It seems to me SE4 is pretty close to Star Trek, and Proportions is somewhere between SE4 and the middle.

<blockquote>quote:<hr />Ok, so you're saying the actual people can be few, because they can control robots who do the actual work. That seems reasonable, but I would say it would be represented by population units in the game.Then the rate of growth is far too low, and should be well over 10-20% per year, because robots don't require two decades to mature.
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Maybe not at your year 3000 tech level. At the tech level I imagine, robots would still require specialization and infrastructure development, which requires massive continuous transport of spare parts and supplies, as well as technological specialization, and infrastructure development on the planet to make the facilities feasible and productive.

<blockquote>quote:<hr /> How much of a population unit is actual people, and how much is droids and equiment and supplies and so on, is abstracted. So how much machinery, equipment, supplies, and machinery are you expecting to need? It too is going to need fuel and spare parts and other materials. Just exploring and studying the environment is going to take a long time, not to mention designing and engineering solutions.If you can live easily in space, then you can live in just about any other environment that exists, unless the atmospheric pressure is too high, or it badly corrodes your hull materials. Any other situation is no more difficult to survive than a vacuum.
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I don't see people "surviving easily" in a vacuum. They survive inside carefully and expensively produced and maintained artificial environments. Fragile environments which are only possible thanks to massive amounts of infrastructure which exists only on the homeworld. Planets generally are more inhospitible than vaccuum, especially before their environments have been explored and understood.

<blockquote>quote:<hr />A Proportions mine facility does not represent a continent-sized mine. If I were to add a continent-sized mine facility, well, it'd cost a lot more than my MegaComplexes do. The megacomplexes I do have represent less industry than a cultural center contains, and they produce up to 750 units/turn.I still think you are far overestimating the need for population to run such things. We only use our population for many things on Earth because it is so high and because unemployment is politically bad.
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It's not just a question of "population to run such things". Infrastructure (energy, supplies, spare parts, transportation, etc) and hospitible environments, are also represented by population, and by cultural facilities. Your imagined technology seems to include the ability to make everything from refined metals to microchips to mechanical parts, to limitless power, all from a few simple machines. Mine doesn't.

<blockquote>quote:<hr />Now, it's true that a Proportions robo - miner component can produce up to 800 units/turn, but they also have maintenance costs, including the time to get to the destination, which almost require such a high rate or they won't produce a net gain at all. A mineral base can be built in three turns that will produce 5000 minerals at an asteroid and cost about 500 maintenance a turn.
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Well, you may have found a technique that I didn't think of, there. I'll have to check that for play balance... you may have found something I didn't intend.

<blockquote>quote:<hr />Anyway, thanks a lot for the discussion and feedback (both to you and everyone who's given feedback).Remember that I'm just airing complaints that more relate to my view of colonization than actual problems within proportions. I think that it's one of the better mods out there, although it does push the limits of usability of the game interface with the massive amounts of base spaceyards that the homeworld can support.

It's good enough that I'm using the basic concept of slow development (with huge payoff at the end however) for a few of the races in my own crossover mod.<hr /></blockquote>Sounds interesting!

PvK

Fyron

October 22nd, 2002, 10:40 AM

quote:
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quote:
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Now, it's true that a Proportions robo - miner component can produce up to 800 units/turn, but they also have maintenance costs, including the time to get to the destination, which almost require such a high rate or they won't produce a net gain at all.
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A mineral base can be built in three turns that will produce 5000 minerals at an asteroid and cost about 500 maintenance a turn.

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Well, you may have found a technique that I didn't think of, there. I'll have to check that for play balance... you may have found something I didn't intend.You want to see what space station mining bases can do? I can send you a nice savegame using FQM to make the map. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon10.gif (I don't recommend adding asteroid belts like those in FQM to Proportions, cause it is insane. Maybe a few asteroids per system instead of 1, but definitely not 25+ http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon10.gif ). Remember, in one of the gold patches, asteroid values were increased from 50-150 to 150-300 (or so). They are much, much better at resource production than they used to be.

Also, colony ships are mostly pointless in Proportions. It is a lot less time consuming to send out a SYS and a few population transports, and building the colony ship right over the planet. This is especiallty true if the planet is a few systems (or more) away from the homeworld.

oleg

October 22nd, 2002, 02:46 PM

Originally posted by Imperator Fyron:
[Also, colony ships are mostly pointless in Proportions. It is a lot less time consuming to send out a SYS and a few population transports, and building the colony ship right over the planet. This is especiallty true if the planet is a few systems (or more) away from the homeworld.Yes, if planet is more than 12 sectors away, it is faster to build medium transport with space yard (2 turns on homeworld, speed 4) and use it to build minimal colony ship on site (4 turns on emergency build) than colonise "normal" way. The save in resources is enormous, I think it is almost _3 times cheeper_. Pesonally, I look on this tactic as almost as cheeting and refrain to use it in solo plays. PvK, may be it would be better to remove "cargo" ability from space yard ?

Or give colony ship big maintanace reduction? Cost should stay the same - you still need to build it either way, the big loophole is enormous maintanance of colony ship that can be skipped by building it onsite.

geoschmo

October 22nd, 2002, 04:16 PM

Originally posted by PvK:
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How many years did it take to develop the unmanned probe to Mars that crashed because someone had a math error converting Imperial units to Metric, and how much did that cost?
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Posted by Graeme:
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It cost only around $150 million dollars, and took less than five years to develop. By the time a SE4 game starts, the people have faster than light drives, and spaceships that can travel across solar systems with a full crew within a single month. Their level of technology is far, far ahead of ours.

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Posted by Imperator Fyron:
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Well, again, your imagination of SE4's tech levels is simply much higher than mine. For example, I don't see SE4 as starting with FTL drives. Light takes EIGHT MINUTES to get from the Sun to the Earth. An SE4 turn is about a month. So, light speed in SE4 would be oh, probably well over 1000, not 6 (ion engine speed in SE4).
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But Graeme's point is valid though if you throw out the FTL part. Ships in SE4 don't travel FTL speeds within system, but they go a LOT faster than anything we can currently do. The Voyager Probes were launched what, 30 years ago? And an SE4 ship launched from Earth now could catch them in about 2 months.

You guys's got me thinking about FTL in SE4 tersm though. I didn't want to hijack this thread so I started a new one.

Link to OT thread (http://www.shrapnelgames.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=23;t=007281)

Geoschmo

PvK

October 22nd, 2002, 04:46 PM

PvK

October 22nd, 2002, 04:46 PM

Originally posted by geoschmo:

But Graeme's point is valid though if you throw out the FTL part. Ships in SE4 don't travel FTL speeds within system, but they go a LOT faster than anything we can currently do. The Voyager Probes were launched what, 30 years ago? And an SE4 ship launched from Earth now could catch them in about 2 months.
...Yes, his point that tech in SE4 is far ahead of our 2002 tech is of course valid. Again, it's a matter of proportions. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon12.gif He thinks the starting tech is so high as to be able to hand-wave away many problems. Infinite energy with no specialized fuel, the ability to survive in any environment, and the ability to manufacture anything immediately from raw materials, without any specialized research and design, all seem to be starting techs, as far as his point of view, while in my case, I see them as either at the end of the SE4 tech tree, or way above the entire tech tree.

One problem I have with imagining such high basic abilities, is that with those abilities, the raw materials and empty space provided by alien planets seem to me like they wouldn't be particularly helpful. The raw materials of a single planet would probably be more than enough to provide for all the needs of such an advanced techology. The main advantages of spreading out would be dispersion and maneuver, not providing "used up resources" or "room to study".

PvK

[ October 22, 2002, 15:48: Message edited by: PvK ]

geoschmo

October 22nd, 2002, 05:26 PM

Originally posted by PvK:
[QUOTE]One problem I have with imagining such high basic abilities, is that with those abilities, the raw materials and empty space provided by alien planets seem to me like they wouldn't be particularly helpful. The raw materials of a single planet would probably be more than enough to provide for all the needs of such an advanced techology. The main advantages of spreading out would be dispersion and maneuver, not providing "used up resources" or "room to study".Good point. And a lot of Sci-Fi ignores the whole "expand by colonization" thing. The assumption there seems to be more in line with your belief that starting a new planet from scratch takes a tremendously long time. Even in Star Trek with their matter replication technologies, terroforming worlds takes generations.

The large empires in Sci-Fi are typically built through conquering and subjugating exsisting alien populations with the infrastructure more or less intact. There are of course many examples of powerful empires that have star spanning influence, but these typically only talk about a few large population centers. I.E. "The Homeworld".

Problem is though with SE4, you can only have 20 players, computer or not. So it's hard to really get that satisfying "Master of all you survey" feeling when you only have one large planet and a half a dozen measly colonies that cost more to defend than they produce in return. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon7.gif

Geoschmo

[ October 22, 2002, 16:27: Message edited by: geoschmo ]

Suicide Junkie

October 22nd, 2002, 05:48 PM

The space yard ship shortcut to colonization is an irritant. I'll have to do something about that, and probably the asteroid mining base thing, at least for future Versions. I have a feeling people would get peeved if I changed it for existing PBW games... or at least, perhaps I can get feedback from players of existing PBW players on what if anything I should do to reduce the effectiveness of these techniques in existing games.If you set the organics build rate on spaceborne yards to zero, then you could control which vehicles and objects require planetary support for say, crews.
Sats, mines, drones, retrofits and repairs can all be done, no problem. For fighters, only fully automated ones could be built.
(Make master computers use no organics, and possibly add a computer component for fighters)

You could have base-only yards that construct with organics, but require organics to build in the first place.
Call 'em "Full SpaceYard" and "Remote Spaceyard"

That way, orbital (full) yards would work normally, but you still can't build a full yard over an uncolonized planet...

In order to make absolutely sure people can't build a remote yard and then retrofit to a full yard, force them to be on different hulls. You could have the abilities built into 100kt copies of the Space Yard, (accounting for the 400kt of space saved).
Remove the components from available tech, so they can't be retrofitted onto regular bases.

geoschmo

October 22nd, 2002, 06:13 PM

As an alternate solution, you could lower the organic build rate of space yard components, but not remove it completely, and raise the organic cost of the colony component.

The limiting factor of fighter construction, and ship construction for that matter is typically the mineral content of the designs. You could probably find a ratio that make the colony ship inefficent enough to build on location, without seriously affecting the fighter build rate of the space yard comps, and without greatly increasing the build time of the colony ship on the homeworld, without requiring any further modifications. If it makes the maintenance too high on the colony ship you could add a slight maint reduction for the colony comp as well.

No it wouldn't totally remove the possibility of someone building a colony ship onsite. But the reason they are doing it is because it's quicker that way. Take away the incentive, and if they still do it, so what?

Geoschmo

EDIT: Actually SJ, I just realized the fighter comps don't reaquire any organics already. So no comp mods would be required either way. The only thing that could be a problem would be for a race that is organic.

[ October 22, 2002, 17:23: Message edited by: geoschmo ]

oleg

October 22nd, 2002, 06:27 PM

Originally posted by geoschmo:
As an alternate solution, you could lower the organic build rate of space yard components, but not remove it completely, and raise the organic cost of the colony component.

The limiting factor of fighter construction, and ship construction for that matter is typically the mineral content of the designs. You could probably find a ratio that make the colony ship inefficent enough to build on location, without seriously affecting the fighter build rate of the space yard comps, and without greatly increasing the build time of the colony ship on the homeworld, without requiring any further modifications. If it makes the maintenance too high on the colony ship you could add a slight maint reduction for the colony comp as well.

No it wouldn't totally remove the possibility of someone building a colony ship onsite. But the reason they are doing it is because it's quicker that way. Take away the incentive, and if they still do it, so what?

GeoschmoNo, it will totally cripple AI - AI will still try to build colony ships on base space yards.

One of the major features of Proportions is that majority of ship building occur on orbital space yard - it takes too long to get a productive planetary space yard even on your first colony and you can not keep up with just one homeworld spaceyards. Any changes to space yards will have big repercautions and must be taken with big care.

In the meantime I think the reduction of colonyship maintainance can balance it a bit.

Suicide Junkie

October 22nd, 2002, 06:42 PM

it takes too long to get a productive planetary space yard even on your first colony and you can not keep up with just one homeworld spaceyards.You will be able to build full capability spaceyards in orbit of planets, though.
You just can't make them mobile, and you can't build them out in the depths of space...
The homeworld would probably end up with tens of Full-ability spaceyards in orbit.

The reduced ability yards could still be used out on the frontiers to replace automated units and vehicles, build defenses, and repair/retrofit.

Colony ships, and large, crewed vessels could only be built by a planet, or any spaceyard base IN ORBIT of a planet.

geoschmo

October 22nd, 2002, 06:56 PM

Oleg, so you want the colony ships buildable at space yards on bases, but not on space yards on ships? Still doable.

You make two separate space yard components. One that is base only, and one that is ship only. The base only one is the same as the current space yard comp, the ship only one has the reduction in organic capacity. And you increase the organic cost of the colony comp, but not so much that the total organic cost of the colony ship is more than the total mineral cost. The result is the colony ships takes the same amount of time it does now on the base yard or planet yard, but much longer on the ship yard.

Already you come close to a solution, but I suppose a determined individual could send his space yard ship to the planet, build a base yard, which will build a colony ship. To reduce that you raise the organic cost of the base only space yard comp.

This is basically the idea SJ proposed, I am simply saying you don't have to eliminate the organic build of these comps entirely. By simply lowering it some, and raiseing the organic cost of the colony comp, you can reach a balance where they are not impossible to build remotly, but can only efficently be built at either planet based or base based yards, not ship based ones.

The only negative ramifications to the AI would be a higher maint bill in organics for any exsisting colony ships. This can be offset by the maint reduction of the colony comp. And if the AI builds a Ship with a ship only space yard and then tries to build a colony ship. It won't criple the AI, but it will tie up that particular ships build queue. Not sure how many AI build those ships though.

Geoschmo

[ October 22, 2002, 17:57: Message edited by: geoschmo ]

Fyron

October 22nd, 2002, 08:18 PM

Geo, I normally have my SYS build a BSY first, then it moves to a different planet. The BSY builds the colony ship, and then builds defensive units. So, your solution affects nothing. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon10.gif

geoschmo

October 22nd, 2002, 08:24 PM

Originally posted by Imperator Fyron:
Geo, I normally have my SYS build a BSY first, then it moves to a different planet. The BSY builds the colony ship, and then builds defensive units. So, your solution affects nothing. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon10.gif Of course it does. Because your SYS would take so long to build the BSY you would be better off just building the colony ship at an exsisting BSY or a planetary facility. That's the entire point. The SYS could still build a BSY or a colony ship, but it would be a very inefficent way to do it. It would lose it's edge. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon7.gif

Geoschmo

Fyron

October 22nd, 2002, 08:29 PM

Ok, then that would not be a good solution, if the organics rate is lowered so much that a SYS can't even build a BSY in a reasonable amount of time. What about building up WP defenses? BSYs are necessary there, to get replenishable stores of units and such.

[ October 22, 2002, 19:30: Message edited by: Imperator Fyron ]

Suicide Junkie

October 22nd, 2002, 09:05 PM

If you were to require the full-rate BSY to have a whole lot of crew quarters, it would look better regarding its ability to build fully crewed ships http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon7.gif

And don't forget the fact that you could still quickly build a spaceyard that makes units and defenses as fast as normal.

Fyron: You can still build a defense base quickly, you just can't build a base with a full-ability spaceyard.

Fyron

October 22nd, 2002, 09:14 PM

If you were to require the full-rate BSY to have a whole lot of crew quarters, it would look better regarding its ability to build fully crewed ships http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon7.gif Too bad you can't make a component require crew quarters. That would have to be required by the base hull, which would make defense bases require tons of crew too.

And don't forget the fact that you could still quickly build a spaceyard that makes units and defenses as fast as normal.That isn't the point. And it screws over Organic races, whos units tend to require lots of organics.

Fyron: You can still build a defense base quickly, you just can't build a base with a full-ability spaceyard.You need BSYs there too, not just a few defense bases. And you and Geo are talking about 2 entirely separate systems, so arguements agaisnt one may not apply as well against the other. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon10.gif

geoschmo

October 22nd, 2002, 11:42 PM

SJ Said: And don't forget the fact that you could still quickly build a spaceyard that makes units and defenses as fast as normal. Fyron Said:That isn't the point. And it screws over Organic races, whos units tend to require lots of organics.Wrong. Well wrong with my idea, maybe right with SJ's. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon7.gif Even with Organic races the units cost four or five times as much in minerals as they do organics. So you can lower the organic build rate significantly and not decrease the rate of unit construction a bit.

SJ Said: You can still build a defense base quickly, you just can't build a base with a full-ability spaceyard. Fyron Said:You need BSYs there too, not just a few defense bases. And you and Geo are talking about 2 entirely separate systems, so arguements agaisnt one may not apply as well against the other. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon10.gif Maybe with SJ's idea you are right here too. With mine you don't need BSYs at all, cause your SYS's can build the units at the same rate. But if you want BSY's you can build them, they just take longer. This could be adjusted so that the only things that take any longer to build than they do now is colony ships and BSY's. And those two would only take longer to build when being constructed by a SYS.

Actually my suggestion is the same as SJ's. The only difference is he is saying take out the organic rate completely, I am saying just reduce it, and increase the organic cost of the colony comp and BSY comp.

EDIT: It would make building a spherworld take longer, but anyone trying that in Proportions is just sick anyway. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon7.gif

Geoschmo

[ October 22, 2002, 23:37: Message edited by: geoschmo ]

Fyron

October 23rd, 2002, 01:11 AM

My organic WPs usually cost many more orgs than mins, actually. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/tongue.gif

geoschmo

October 23rd, 2002, 02:30 AM

Originally posted by Imperator Fyron:
My organic WPs usually cost many more orgs than mins, actually. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/tongue.gif That may be true, but they aren't much good for defending warp points now are they? http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/rolleyes.gif

Graeme Dice

October 23rd, 2002, 06:17 AM

Originally posted by PvK:
Yes, his point that tech in SE4 is far ahead of our 2002 tech is of course valid. Again, it's a matter of proportions. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon12.gif He thinks the starting tech is so high as to be able to hand-wave away many problems. Infinite energy with no specialized fuel, the ability to survive in any environment, and the ability to manufacture anything immediately from raw materials, without any specialized research and design, all seem to be starting techs, as far as his point of view, while in my case, I see them as either at the end of the SE4 tech tree, or way above the entire tech tree.All you need for essentially infinite energy with no fuel problems is a net gain deuterium fusion reactor. The amount of D2 available in the Oceans is so massive that it would easily Last for longer than we've been recording our history.

One problem I have with imagining such high basic abilities, is that with those abilities, the raw materials and empty space provided by alien planets seem to me like they wouldn't be particularly helpful. The raw materials of a single planet would probably be more than enough to provide for all the needs of such an advanced techology. The main advantages of spreading out would be dispersion and maneuver, not providing "used up resources" or "room to study".Exponential growth requires exponential room. Population growth is exponential.

Graeme Dice

October 23rd, 2002, 06:43 AM

Well again, we disagree. I think you're oversimplifying, and not considering many problems which will take serious amounts of time to develop. Developing technology, even in completely understood conditions on a home planet completely supported by infrastructure, takes time. And, it seems to me there would be millions of issues in trying to convert an alien planet into a homeworld-equivalent.The thing is that you don't

Perhaps if you look at it as just a lab. However, that wasn't my point - you're looking at my question upside-down. What I was trying to say, is that a civilization only manages to raise so much novel thought and invention per year, mostly by the top fringe of its intellectual elite.Most basic technology research is limited more by funding than by a lack of minds. Double the money you give to a professor, and they will greatly increase the number of grad students working for them.

An excellent educational system, and a gathering of minds to educate the best students in the best way, is a product of the culture as a whole, and is made possible, protected, and nurtured, by social factors built up over centuries, and which have essentially nothing to do with finding more space on alien planets to build labs.The social factors already exist however, and don't need to be built up over centuries. A colony of ours on Mars or the Moon doesn't need to reinvent steam power, go through the industrial revolution, or develop a working economic system, they can simply use the knowledge and experience that already exists.

Well, clearly our assumptions vary widely. For example, I don't see "cornucopia fusion power from water" as a basic tech in SE4. If it were so easy to generate power, what are supplies and the Quantum Reactor all about in SE4?Ships can't carry unlimited fuel supplies. A planet with a resupply depot has infinite supplies, representing essentially limitless fueling and energy generation capability. The Quantum Reactor is a method of getting around the fuel/mass ratio problem that plagues ships that require high performances.

I think you are describing a much higher tech level in these things than SE4's tech tree represents. Of course, a mod that made such assumptions (and I think you are making many assumptions about the tech abilities besides just fusion power) would be perfectly legitimate - it's just not what I imagined when I thought about Proportions mod.You should read the Red Mars series by Kim Stanley Robinson. I imagine that a starting empire is at least as advanced as the human's at the end of that series.

Well, again, your imagination of SE4's tech levels is simply much higher than mine. For example, I don't see SE4 as starting with FTL drives. Light takes EIGHT MINUTES to get from the Sun to the Earth. An SE4 turn is about a month. So, light speed in SE4 would be oh, probably well over 1000, not 6 (ion engine speed in SE4).As others have mentioned, they can travel interstellar distances essentially instantly, and have the ability to cross solar systems in a manner of months. That's incredibly more advanced than what we can manage, and indicates that they are using at the very least the equivalent of a fission reactor to generate the power for their ion engines.

Again, I disagree. At least, at the tech levels I imagine. Each planet's environment is quite a bit different. Atmosphere composition is just one of many, many factors.That's why you build buildings and contain your own environment within them. Colonizing Mars is essentially the same as colonizing Antartica, except that there's not enough air to breath.

Just because you can make a chip to survive in an environment, after years of research, doesn't make it cost-effective, or not require separate research and development times thousands of different projects.The 200 degree chips are cost effective when they are the only thing that can do the job. Heck, they're cheap enough that some of my fellow students stuck them into an liquid asphalt tank to measure temperature Last year.

Again, ok, you can redefine population as mostly non-organic droids, but that's just an abstraction. You still need something to be able to perform a massive range of tasks, including self-support and survival in an unexplored environment. You still need power, transportation, and tons of specialized equipment and materials. Using mostly robotic personnel may solve some problems, but it introduces others. You need less food and medicine, but more power, batteries, lubricants, maintenance facilities, and spare parts, etc. If you think this can all be made from chain-reaction factories and built up from rocks, well, I think you're describing year 3000 (or year 4000) technology again.I believe that that is more like year 2100 technology.

Well, I disagree that it's a non-issue, at least without serious tech development. Atmospheric manipulation would be a tech area, as would fusion power, pollution and temperature control, etc.The empires in SE4 need fusion power to be able to accomplish almost any of the tasks they regulary do. You can't generate limitless fuel planet-side in any other manner realistically. Temperature control can be accomplished by large mirrors, pollution doesn't matter when there's nothing living on the world and you can throw things into space for free.

If you have such technologies, maybe. Maybe by year 4000.Hollowing out asteroids automatically and using the raw materials to construct engines is something we should be able to do in about 100-200 years at the very latest.

Given your assumptions, I might say the same thing, but again, it sounds to me like you're 600-2000 years ahead of the techs I'm imagining.I think you've got a very skewed view of the technology level available to a civilization. You've got weapons that can raze entire continents from a single ship, but don't have the technology to build a power plant that can produce less than that much energy on a continuous basis?

Even so, though, I still think planetary conditions would be major economic disincentives. Atmosphere composition would be only one thing. Gravity, radiation, pressure, temperature, volcanic activity, meteor activity, weather activity, indigenous life, indigenous microbes, would all present seriously expensive obstacles.Meteor activity will not be a problem if you have gas giants in system and have a planet with an atmosphere.

Due to the complementary nature, and the complexity, of high-tech infrastructure found on a fully-civilized planet, I don't see alien colonies quickly reaching homeworld-challenging abilities even at very high tech levels. Again, only possibly with massively advanced technology, and even then, it would take signifigant time.I see colonies becoming as powerful as homworlds with no longer than a century after first habitation. It's not going to take longer than it did on Earth to develop the technology, even if you do it from scratch, and I seriously hope you aren't sending colonists down with horse drawn plows and no books.

It seems to me you're reasoning backwards, again. How many of the planets we know of have an Earthlike atmospheric composition? Zero.Mars would be Earth like with a few comets slammed into the surface to release CO2. Venus requires that the CO2 be removed to be earth-like.

Maybe not at your year 3000 tech level. At the tech level I imagine, robots would still require specialization and infrastructure development, which requires massive continuous transport of spare parts and supplies, as well as technological specialization, and infrastructure development on the planet to make the facilities feasible and productive.I think you are expecting technological achievement to slow down from it's current pace far too quickly. Within 50-100 years, we should be able to build self-maintaining AI robots capable of doing all these tasks.

I don't see people "surviving easily" in a vacuum. They survive inside carefully and expensively produced and maintained artificial environments. Fragile environments which are only possible thanks to massive amounts of infrastructure which exists only on the homeworld. Planets generally are more inhospitible than vaccuum, especially before their environments have been explored and understood.Remember that we have free energy thanks to the necessary fusion plants for SE4 to even be possible. With free energy, almost all restrictions on building things become a matter of finding the resources somewhere. You can explore a planet's conditions from orbit easily enough that we do it today.

It's not just a question of "population to run such things". Infrastructure (energy, supplies, spare parts, transportation, etc) and hospitible environments, are also represented by population, and by cultural facilities. Your imagined technology seems to include the ability to make everything from refined metals to microchips to mechanical parts, to limitless power, all from a few simple machines. Mine doesn't.It assumes such capability because such capability is simple to a civilization that can perform feats like those at the beginning of a standard SE4 game.

Well, you may have found a technique that I didn't think of, there. I'll have to check that for play balance... you may have found something I didn't intend.I'd hope it doesn't change, as that's the just about the only thing that makes empire development interesting, as otherwise your forces are unrealistically small.

PvK

October 23rd, 2002, 07:43 AM

Originally posted by Graeme Dice:
All you need for essentially infinite energy with no fuel problems is a net gain deuterium fusion reactor. The amount of D2 available in the Oceans is so massive that it would easily Last for longer than we've been recording our history.
That depends on the characteristics of the technology. A fusion reactor has properties like mass, required components, and a rate of efficiency. Mere "net gain" is not sufficient, if it doesn't produce enough to be effective, relative to its own mass, the mass of fuel per energy produced, its reliability, and the expense and sub-components required to produce and operate.

Again, you seem to me to be assuming that everyone starts out with a technology built in to all units that actually exceeds the abilities of the Quantum Reactor. Or, something close. I don't make that assumption at all. If I did, there would be a really cheap quantum reactor component available. But there isn't. Supplies are a major part of the gameplay in Proportions. If I follow your prediction for the easy bounty of fusion power, then maybe I would add a really cheap quantum reactor component. But I don't think it would improve either realism or interestness of play. Personally, I think quantum reactors unconvincing and boring, since they eliminate one of the major elements of play, which is why I extended that line of components the way I did in Proportions. I suppose you can decide that efficient engines, supply storage, and solar collectors and/or sails can represent this sort of technology in Proportions, but notice there are trade-offs in performance.

<blockquote>quote:<hr />One problem I have with imagining such high basic abilities, is that with those abilities, the raw materials and empty space provided by alien planets seem to me like they wouldn't be particularly helpful. The raw materials of a single planet would probably be more than enough to provide for all the needs of such an advanced techology. The main advantages of spreading out would be dispersion and maneuver, not providing "used up resources" or "room to study".Exponential growth requires exponential room. Population growth is exponential.<hr /></blockquote>I find these two postulates massively less compelling than my two arguments above. Besides, I thought you were saying that population wasn't necessary - all you need is a teenage master 4X game player, some opposite-sex companions, and an ever-increasing self-replicating legion of robots who can produce any component given only some frozen irradiated water and some rocks, right? http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon12.gif

Soon, the robots will swarm to cover the entire surface of every planet they can reach, constantly turning rocks into massive baseships with no supply requirements.

Sounds like it might make an interesting mod, but a very different one from Proportions, which is all about overcoming the difficulties, and having to face multiple trade-offs and decisions at once, instead of just having the magic technology to make everything possible. Or, maybe your view isn't a mod at all - the standard SE4 set seems pretty much in line with what you're suggesting, except that everyone should start with Quantum Reactors.

PvK

[ October 23, 2002, 06:44: Message edited by: PvK ]

Fyron

October 23rd, 2002, 10:12 AM

This "debate" is really funny. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon10.gif

Graeme Dice, no offense, but you have completely missed almost all of (if not all of) PvK's points, and you are insanely wrong about how advanced humans will be in a few centuries.

[ October 23, 2002, 09:28: Message edited by: Imperator Fyron ]

geoschmo

October 23rd, 2002, 12:59 PM

Ok, relax there Fyron. Up till now we've had an interesting, thoughtful debate between two intelligent people who sincerely have differing views of the future. Let's not make it personal, and let's not forget none of us knows the future. Either of them could be right, or neither. It seems to me that both of them have done a good job of understanding what the other is saying, they just don't agree. Nothing wrong with that. That is one of the reasons for the forum.

Geoschmo

[ October 23, 2002, 13:05: Message edited by: geoschmo ]

Mylon

October 23rd, 2002, 04:17 PM

Remember what a lot of people said couldn't be done. Think how much of that we're doing on a daily basis today (mostly flying).

Technology advances pretty quickly. Just 25-30 years ago we were still using vaccuum tubes.

oleg

October 23rd, 2002, 04:41 PM

Originally posted by Mylon:
Remember what a lot of people said couldn't be done. Think how much of that we're doing on a daily basis today (mostly flying).

Technology advances pretty quickly. Just 25-30 years ago we were still using vaccuum tubes.30 years ago we were on Moon. Where are we now ?
Nay, progress is greatly overrated.

DirectorTsaarx

October 23rd, 2002, 04:57 PM

Originally posted by geoschmo:
Ok, relax there Fyron. Up till now we've had an interesting, thoughtful debate between two intelligent people who sincerely have differing views of the future. Let's not make it personal, and let's not forget none of us knows the future. Either of them could be right, or neither. It seems to me that both of them have done a good job of understanding what the other is saying, they just don't agree. Nothing wrong with that. That is one of the reasons for the forum.

GeoschmoI'm surprised you had to remind IF about that... he's usually pretty good about correcting the rest of us:
Originally posted by Imperator Fyron (in thread Shield Regen V (http://www.shrapnelgames.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=23;t=007212) ):
...please choose your words more carefully in future Posts. That post could be viewed as the beginning of a flame. Everyone is entitled to their own opinions, and has the same rights to post them. If we disagree, that is perfectly fine.

geoschmo

October 23rd, 2002, 05:49 PM

Now Director. Don't make me bring the smack down on you, ok? http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon10.gif Just let it slide. Everyone is entitled to a mispeak now and then.

DirectorTsaarx

October 23rd, 2002, 07:46 PM

Originally posted by geoschmo:
Now Director. Don't make me bring the smack down on you, ok? http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon10.gif Just let it slide. Everyone is entitled to a mispeak now and then.Sorry - I really was trying to defend his good name; at least this community tries to police itself...

Anyway - everyone return to the topic at hand:

IMHO, Proportions does a very good job of slowing the game down and changing the emphasis from fast expansion and quick aggression. Beyond that, it has some neat ideas for technology, has led to us players learning new things about how certain facility abilities interact, and provided a new way to play a favorite game. Whether it's "realistic" (or, at least, more "realistic" than the unmodded game) is certainly open to debate.

To draw on an example from science fiction, the colonies in Larry Niven's "Known Space" series will certainly not compete with Earth as far as resource production (or research, or intelligence). They suffer from exactly the problems PvK points out, i.e. inhospitable conditions over most of the colony planet, but without the major technological advances postulated by Graeme and others (cheap power, cheap intelligent robotic work force, etc.).

On the other hand, that same series postulates a thriving "colony" of sorts in the asteroid belt that competes quite well with Earth, nearly surpassing it on occasion (IIRC). Maybe it was because of proximity to the homeworld; the Civilization series of games certainly models that aspect of an empire by imposing a production penalty on cities based on distance from the capitol (modified by infrastructure - roads, railroads, etc.). Now, as someone mentioned previously on this thread, SE4 doesn't provide that sort of modeling, probably because trade routes are not really modeled (there's some handwaving in the manual, and I'm not certain I want the added micromanagement of establishing trade routes in SE4; but then sometimes I would like that feature, so I could focus on something besides blowing up my neighbor's ships and committing genocide http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon12.gif ).

Anyway, it's certainly been an interesting debate; postulating future technology and when it will be available is a favorite game among engineers.

One final point - I have to agree with PvK about research centers not necessarily being linearly additive. Research institutions (at least the ones I've worked for) are notorious for competing with other labs (or even with other scientists in the same lab), thus reducing the additive effect (and negating some of the "parallel processing" benefits). There's some benefit in that each lab will work harder to get the result first, but I wouldn't say that two labs competing with each other will get a job done twice as fast. What's the old saying, "9 women can't have a baby in a month"? Now, research isn't exactly the same thing, but forcing 9 labs to work on a small piece of some large project isn't necessarily going to result in completion of that large project 9 times faster than if a single lab was working on it. In that case, there are two limiting factors:
 Length of time required to complete the slowest/hardest/most complex piece of research Coordination between the labs to ensure that each lab's result will interoperate with the other labs That first point comes up in discussions of parallel processing on computers; no operation can be performed faster than the slowest task (or, more completely, than the longest chain of serial tasks, since some tasks depend on results from other tasks). The second point has bitten me in the... neck... repeatedly. Two separate Groups come up with elegant solutions to their respective pieces of a problem, and the solutions are completely incompatible. Now, if we assume absolute dictatorial management, that second point becomes less of a problem; but, in SE4 terms, unless your race description includes something like "fanatical devotion to the leader", I'd be hard-pressed to guarantee that the scientists will pay much attention to said dictator. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon10.gif
Anyway, that's my two cents on the current discussion. Feel free to disagree...

oleg

October 23rd, 2002, 08:14 PM

Originally posted by DirectorTsaarx:
One final point - I have to agree with PvK about research centers not necessarily being linearly additive. Research institutions (at least the ones I've worked for) are notorious for competing with other labs (or even with other scientists in the same lab), thus reducing the additive effect (and negating some of the "parallel processing" benefits). There's some benefit in that each lab will work harder to get the result first, but I wouldn't say that two labs competing with each other will get a job done twice as fast. What's the old saying, "9 women can't have a baby in a month"? Now, research isn't exactly the same thing, but forcing 9 labs to work on a small piece of some large project isn't necessarily going to result in completion of that large project 9 times faster than if a single lab was working on it. In that case, there are two limiting factors:
 Coordination between the labs to ensure that each lab's result will interoperate with the other labs That first point comes up in discussions of parallel processing on computers; no operation can be performed faster than the slowest task (or, more completely, than the longest chain of serial tasks, since some tasks depend on results from other tasks). The second point has bitten me in the... neck... repeatedly. Two separate Groups come up with elegant solutions to their respective pieces of a problem, and the solutions are completely incompatible. Now, if we assume absolute dictatorial management, that second point becomes less of a problem; but, in SE4 terms, unless your race description includes something like "fanatical devotion to the leader", I'd be hard-pressed to guarantee that the scientists will pay much attention to said dictator. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon10.gif
Anyway, that's my two cents on the current discussion. Feel free to disagree...Actually, It is a good thing that several labs are working on similar projects - without peer review there would be no way to assure reliability and reproducability (sp.) of data. There would be no Science as we know it.

DirectorTsaarx

October 23rd, 2002, 11:08 PM

Originally posted by oleg:
Actually, It is a good thing that several labs are working on similar projects - without peer review there would be no way to assure reliability and reproducability (sp.) of data. There would be no Science as we know it.Good point; and that provides further support for the notion that multiple labs do NOT provide linear increases in technological progression. The science may be more accurate, thanks to peer review, but that doesn't make 4 labs twice as efficient as 2 labs...

geoschmo

October 24th, 2002, 01:05 AM

On the other hand it's entirely possible that for some topics of research four labs would be more than twice as efficent as two labs. Sometimes in research and development the total is greater than the sum of the parts. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon7.gif Because most of the time involved in coming up with new technologies is trying and ruling out possibilities that end up not working, and working along until a fortuitous happenstance occurs. The more different people you have working on these different posibilities in different places simultaneously, the more chance for someone to hit on one of these discoveries.

Geoschmo

Fyron

October 24th, 2002, 02:39 AM

Just because you build more labs does not mean that you will instantly gain new staff to work in those labs. You can only have so many qualified researchers. Throwing a lot of money into it doesn't necessarily mean that you will get more Newtons, Eintsteins, Hawkings, etc.

geoschmo

October 24th, 2002, 04:02 AM

Very true. However there is often a difference between pure scientific discovery and technological advancment. The greats that you mention and others like them are exceedingly rare. Most of technology and invention is a gradual process of hard work and experimentation that is built on the work of these greats. "Standing on the shoulders of giants". And often great intuitive leaps have been made by otherwise obscure researchers that never did anything truely notable before or after their "one great discovery".

The great theoretical physics done by Einstein and others uncovered the principles of atomic power, but it was the grunt work done by many labs all over the world that put the theories into pratical applications like nuclear reactors and nuclear weapons. Whether or speed of advancment in this grunt work is linerly related to the number of people working on the problem is debatable. Likely reasonable arguments could be made on both sides. I am not sure if it's possible to ever know for sure, even for past discoveries, much less predict future ones.

Don't get me wrong though. I am not trying to make the case that Proportions somehow "has it wrong". I am simply engaging in a philisophical discussion.

I tend to take a much more abstract view of all of this stuff in SE4 anyway, rather than try to shoehorn it into a strict realistic view. I see research in SE4 as being the more practical application side of things. It's the R&D. In many cases "more money" is exactly what brings about innovation.

Geoschmo

Graeme Dice

October 24th, 2002, 05:38 AM

Originally posted by Imperator Fyron:
This "debate" is really funny. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon10.gif

Graeme Dice, no offense, but you have completely missed almost all of (if not all of) PvK's points, and you are insanely wrong about how advanced humans will be in a few centuries.I debate for the sake of debate, whether or not I truly agree with a position. I also don't think that it's that far off in the future where we will be able to send off an automated factory to a nickel/iron asteroid, and have it produce just about anything from the materials present.

Graeme Dice

October 24th, 2002, 05:39 AM

Originally posted by oleg:
30 years ago we were on Moon. Where are we now ?
Nay, progress is greatly overrated.[/QB]Right now we are about as far from getting a man to Mars as we were from getting a man to the Moon when Kennedy committed the States to it. In other words, we could have the technological capability to get a person there and back again within a couple of decades if we decided to do it.

Mylon

October 24th, 2002, 07:35 AM

I dare claim that we have the technology to do it now. It's just that lifting up enough people, supplies, and fuel for a 6 month mission may prove a little more costly than what anyone would be willing to bear. The problem usually isn't what's possibe, but what is practical. SEIV seems to casually ignore this as you can easily run your empire into bankrupcy without rioting of any sort, much less being "relieved" of command for poor performance.

[ October 24, 2002, 06:36: Message edited by: Mylon ]

Phoenix-D

October 24th, 2002, 08:16 AM

SE4 also has different races; personally I would be a bit peeved if all the races used the type of behavior you're talking about. In certain races, and in others under the right circumstances, you *wouldn't* get riots from no production.

PHoenix-D

Fyron

October 24th, 2002, 08:33 AM

Originally posted by Graeme Dice:
I debate for the sake of debate, whether or not I truly agree with a position. I also don't think that it's that far off in the future where we will be able to send off an automated factory to a nickel/iron asteroid, and have it produce just about anything from the materials present.A factory cannot produce just any old thing. It can only produce what it is designed to produce without being completely retooled. A single factory capable of producing anything will probably never be possible.

dogscoff

October 24th, 2002, 09:39 AM

Right now we are about as far from getting a man to Mars as we were from getting a man to the Moon when Kennedy committed the States to it. In other words, we could have the technological capability to get a person there and back again within a couple of decades if we decided to do it.

...

I dare claim that we have the technology to do it now.
I read a book a while agao by Arthur C Clarke. Can't remember what it was called, but it was looking at the possibility of going to Mars and terraforming it etc etc.

Anyway, in this book, there was mention of a project conceived just after the 2nd W War by one of the nazi rocket scientists. He had laid out plans and costs for a trip to Mars using 1940s or 1950s technology! He would have lifted a hideous amount of hardware into space using bigass rockets, then used more bigass rockets to send a fleet of 12 ships to Mars.

He described the costs of things by comparing them to military campaigns, and decided that a trip to Mars could have been done for the same price as a "small war".

Now this guy clearly wasn't quite screwed on tight enough, and hardly anything was known at that point about the effects of zero-G and survival in space so the mission might well have failed for those reasons, but I imagine his maths would have been sound as regards moving the necessary amount of mass the required distance.
With what we know now there's no doubt we could get ppl to Mars if someone was just willing to cough up the cash.

Maybe if we could persuade certain world leaders to refrain from starting small wars, the human race could actually do something useful.

Not sure where I'm going with all this, but it was an interesting book...

geoschmo

October 24th, 2002, 12:40 PM

Originally posted by Imperator Fyron:
[QUOTE]A factory cannot produce just any old thing. It can only produce what it is designed to produce without being completely retooled. A single factory capable of producing anything will probably never be possible.This could be an issue with symantics. It may be possible very soon (<100 years) to create a small automated "factory" that can produce anything we set it up to produce, but not everything without being retooled as you say. But it could produce a wide range of finished goods without being retooled. The same robots for example could be reprogrammed to build cars or pickup trucks with very minor programming changes. While switching to make 3 piece suits will be a little more difficult. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon7.gif

Also, given another 100 years in the process of laser modeling and you will have automated processes capable of a truely astonishing range of flexibility. Currently it's only used for rapid protoyping and what not, but it's not too far from being able to produce usable assemply line parts. Not quite a matter replicator ala Trek, but not far from it.

Also, there may be truely no limits to what can be done if we are able to come up with some practical nano-technology.

Geoschmo

oleg

October 24th, 2002, 12:56 PM

Originally posted by geoschmo:
<blockquote>quote:<hr />Originally posted by Imperator Fyron:
[QUOTE]A factory cannot produce just any old thing. It can only produce what it is designed to produce without being completely retooled. A single factory capable of producing anything will probably never be possible.This could be an issue with symantics. It may be possible very soon (<100 years) to create a small automated "factory" that can produce anything we set it up to produce, but not everything without being retooled as you say. But it could produce a wide range of finished goods without being retooled. The same robots for example could be reprogrammed to build cars or pickup trucks with very minor programming changes. While switching to make 3 piece suits will be a little more difficult. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon7.gif

Also, given another 100 years in the process of laser modeling and you will have automated processes capable of a truely astonishing range of flexibility. Currently it's only used for rapid protoyping and what not, but it's not too far from being able to produce usable assemply line parts. Not quite a matter replicator ala Trek, but not far from it.

Also, there may be truely no limits to what can be done if we are able to come up with some practical nano-technology.

Geoschmo<hr /></blockquote>If we can make a factory that will produce anything then it will certainly able to produce copies of itself. Then humanity will cease to exist. You say it will be possible very soon (<100y) ? Geee, next generation is the Last one.

oleg

October 24th, 2002, 02:11 PM

I guess we should wait and see. Certainly, humanity is not a pinacle of evolution.

Mylon

October 24th, 2002, 04:14 PM

To paraphrase from Alpha Centauri:

We give more and more power to these... THINGS. Lumps of metal and paste we call nanorobots. What will happen when these homunculi awaken one day and realise that they have no further need of us?
-Sister Miriam, We Must Dissent

DirectorTsaarx

October 24th, 2002, 04:47 PM

Originally posted by Mylon:
To paraphrase from Alpha Centauri:

We give more and more power to these... THINGS. Lumps of metal and paste we call nanorobots. What will happen when these homunculi awaken one day and realise that they have no further need of us?
-Sister Miriam, We Must DissentThen it'll be time for the Butlerian Jihad, and Frank Herbert's vision will have come true... http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon12.gif

TerranC

October 24th, 2002, 10:15 PM

Aren't you all making this more confusing by discussing rhetorics from sci-fi books?

Fyron

October 24th, 2002, 10:46 PM

Geo, I tried not to write that post to be confusing. I had first written "a factory that can produce anything", but then changed it to what it says now. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon10.gif

Anyways, my point was not that we could not make an automated factory, but that we could not make an automated factory capable of producing whatever we needed it to at any particular moment in time. Even it the factory was capable of retooling itself, it would still need to do so to produce something different than what it was original set up to produce.

geoschmo

October 25th, 2002, 01:23 AM

Originally posted by oleg:
If we can make a factory that will produce anything then it will certainly able to produce copies of itself. Then humanity will cease to exist. You say it will be possible very soon (<100y) ? Geee, next generation is the Last one.Uh, again I think you are missing the symantic difference between being able to create an automated, single purpose factory that can produce ANYthing, and an automated multi-purpose factory that can produce EVERYthing.

A robotic factory that can build a finished product from prefabricated components can be done now, if we had the political will to do it. And the components can be created robotically as well. Given another couple decades of advancements in automation and we could build a factory that can produce a finished product from unpocessed raw materials coming in the door. Note I say, could, not that we would. Who wants to be the company known for building cars without hiring any people? http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon7.gif

The hundred years would really only be needed to make the advancments in miniturization required to put such a factory in space out in the asteroid belt.

But again, this would be a single use facility, capable of building a specfic finished product. That wouldn't mean it would be capable of building another factory.

But even if it were, your assumption is wrong. Even if I had meant that in a hundred years we could create a factroy that could build EVERYthing, including copies of itself, why does that nessecarily result in the end of humanity? I don't see the correlation between the two.

Geoschmo

dogscoff

December 19th, 2002, 04:25 PM

Sorry to dredge up this old thread, and PvK I know you're taking a break from modding, but something just occurred to me. Not sure how well it would work, but...

How about if you were to tweak the system generation files so that planets have (for example) 20 times more facilities on them. Then reduce the resource output and cost of all facilities by the same factor.

This might help address some of the concerns raised in this thread, many of which essentially revolve around tying up planetary queues with lengthy city constructions and upgrades.

This way, instead of spending 100 turns building a metropolis, you'd build 20 metropolises at 5 turns each for the same result. This means you could interrupt the process half way through without having to completely abandon a project which has already taken 50 turns.

The difficulty would come with (a) facilties which produce resources in a quantity not satisfactorily divided by whatever multiplication factor is chosen and (b) incorporating space ports & resupply bases into cities...

sorry if this has been suggested before...

oleg

December 19th, 2002, 04:33 PM

Originally posted by dogscoff:
Sorry to dredge up this old thread, and PvK I know you're taking a break from modding, but something just occurred to me. Not sure how well it would work, but...

How about if you were to tweak the system generation files so that planets have (for example) 20 times more facilities on them. Then reduce the resource output and cost of all facilities by the same factor.

This might help address some of the concerns raised in this thread, many of which essentially revolve around tying up planetary queues with lengthy city constructions and upgrades.

This way, instead of spending 100 turns building a metropolis, you'd build 20 metropolises at 5 turns each for the same result. This means you could interrupt the process half way through without having to completely abandon a project which has already taken 50 turns.

The difficulty would come with (a) facilties which produce resources in a quantity not satisfactorily divided by whatever multiplication factor is chosen and (b) incorporating space ports & resupply bases into cities...

sorry if this has been suggested before...Yes, it was suggested before. PvK (me too) opposes this idea. The reason that it can kill the major point of Proportions: importance of the population. The key factor is SEIV planet can build only one facility per turn. Thus, if you make cheaper facilities, you will be able to ship some amount of people that will build one facility per turn. No more people on the planet will be requried. In "default" Proportions, the more people on planet, the better.