Re: Proportions mod: So confusing!
 

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 ]

Re: Proportions mod: So confusing!
 

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.

Re: Proportions mod: So confusing!
 

<font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">30 years ago we were on Moon. Where are we now ?
Nay, progress is greatly overrated.

Re: Proportions mod: So confusing!
 

<font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">I'm surprised you had to remind IF about that... he's usually pretty good about correcting the rest of us:
<font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">

Re: Proportions mod: So confusing!
 

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.

Re: Proportions mod: So confusing!
 

<font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">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:
</font>

• <font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">Length of time required to complete the slowest/hardest/most complex piece of research </font>
• <font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">Coordination between the labs to ensure that each lab's result will interoperate with the other labs </font>

<font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">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...

Re: Proportions mod: So confusing!
 

<font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">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.

Re: Proportions mod: So confusing!
 

<font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">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...

Re: Proportions mod: So confusing!
 

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

Re: Proportions mod: So confusing!
 

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.

Re: Proportions mod: So confusing!
 

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

Re: Proportions mod: So confusing!
 

<font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">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.

Re: Proportions mod: So confusing!
 

<font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">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.

Re: Proportions mod: So confusing!
 

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 ]

Re: Proportions mod: So confusing!
 

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

Re: Proportions mod: So confusing!
 

<font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">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.

Re: Proportions mod: So confusing!
 

<font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">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...

Re: Proportions mod: So confusing!
 

[quote]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.

<font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">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

Re: Proportions mod: So confusing!
 

[quote]Originally posted by geoschmo:
</font><blockquote><font size="1" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">quote:</font><hr /><font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">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.

<font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">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</font><hr /></blockquote><font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">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.

Re: Proportions mod: So confusing!
 

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

Re: Proportions mod: So confusing!
 

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

Re: Proportions mod: So confusing!
 

<font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">Then 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

Re: Proportions mod: So confusing!
 

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

Re: Proportions mod: So confusing!
 

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.

Re: Proportions mod: So confusing!
 

<font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">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

Re: Proportions mod: So confusing!
 

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...

Re: Proportions mod: So confusing!
 

<font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">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.