Construction speed and population size
 

It appears that I can build at the same speed on a planet with 4m people as I can on a planet with 1000m ! Is this a bug or a feature?!

Re: Construction speed and population size
 

You get a bonus for constructio & production at levels of 100M, 500M etc.

Perhaps your large planet is less happy, and that is cancelling the effect of the larger population.

Re: Construction speed and population size
 

What is the cost of the item? If a lot of one resource is needed you may not get any reduction on that item. I see that a lot when using emergency build, you build with 50% more resources but the time is not cut in half due to the high quantity of a single resource needed.

Re: Construction speed and population size
 

And IIRC there is a rate display or rate button in the queue window which shows the actual amount of minerals/bio/radiants used for building in one turn, the rate depends on happiness/amount of population and spaceyard rate (if you build a ship). If you divide the costs by the rates you should get the time needed to complete the build.

Edited: If you divide the most expensive of the three materials by the rate... (seems to be more accurat)



[This message has been edited by PsychoTechFreak (edited 24 April 2001).]

Re: Construction speed and population size
 

True that pop of 2000M gives a 30% bonus but surely production on a world with 14m people should not be 70% of one with 2000M, whatever the other circumstances are!

Re: Construction speed and population size
 

I don't see why population even affects production, it is still the same size facility. Maybe they just needed to give you a reason to grow your population.

Re: Construction speed and population size
 

Maybe someone could mod a facility - an Automated Shipyard or something. Specifically NOT affected by population. I don't mod, but it may be possible; a ship-based yard has steady output......

Also, as a FYI, other threads have talked about construction being slow. I'm from Maine (USA for those not familiar with Maine) and we have the Bath Iron Works shipyard. I read an article this AM about building Ageis Destroyers (by no means large ships when comparing to Cruisers, etc.). The article stated that it takes 8 years from beginning construction to delivery to build 1 destoyer (at a cost of $1.2 BILLION BTW!). That would be 80 turns in SE4 time! So, that may shed some new light (for some) on construction speed - it really isn't that slow.....

Re: Construction speed and population size
 

Oh yeah construction is on fast forward but it is all relative, heck you can fully exploit a huge planet in the same time it taks to build a starbase.
I don't think I would enjoy the game as much if it took me 80 turns to build a cruiser. But I would like to see them implement the minimum population per facility to cover all facilities on a planet. That way you can't have 4m pop on a planet with 30 facilities and get the full production from them.

Re: Construction speed and population size
 

In other games your population has a base construction ability and so do your factories. So you can use a small pop to build a factory then use both to build the next factory and so on. But it means if you start with a very small population it is going to take a long time to build that first factory. Having to have a minimum pop to "service" a factory also makes sense. Any chance this will be implemented, do you think? Is it something that can be easily done using the customisability of the game?

Re: Construction speed and population size
 

In the mod I've got going, I 've fipped the plnet/population thing. Tiny Planets (moons) can build 10 facilities, while small+ planets all have 25 facilities. These facilities do not represent an actual "mine" or "lab" instead it represents how the population is divided for various production types. Now, population has a MUCH greater effect... a medium planet(which can now hold 10B people) has production/construction at twice the rate of a small planet (pop. 5B) if population is maxed (small planet have 150%, while medium has 300%, likewise large have 450% for 15B).

All dommed colonies, regardless of size, can have 2 facilities and 100M pop (which gives -25% to production rate) making the population roughly twice as productive as they should be, but then again we're talking about specialist to special worlds. (2facilites/25facilities=.08 x75%/300%=.02... while the population is .01 times that of the med. planet I was comparing it to.)

It works out very nicly, you actually search far and wide for habitable planets... and population really means someting!