I began this topic thinking I was going to argue that colony ships build much too slowly. In MOO2, colony ships take forever and a day to build. Because they take so long, expansion is much slowed, and a colony ship is quite a valuable item. Whereas in SEIV, I build them by the dozens and colonize worlds that I don't even think I can protect. So what if the colony is lost, it's not like that was a whole lot of resources anyways...
At its root, the reason colony ships build so fast is because every colony builds at the same rate--even newly established colonies. Sure, you may say that an 'old' colony on a huge planet with max population is getting a 40 or 50% production bonus. But that is NOTHING in comparison to the different production rates on colonies in MOO2. In that game, you send over as many colonists as you can spare to start building factories on the colony. Until you have any factories, the colony's production is pretty pitiful. But once you have spent a lot of time developing the colony, it can produce ships fairly quickly--and not just ships, it can produce other colony facilities faster as well. That is something which *seemed* to be missing in this game SEIV.
Then, I realized something. The concept of mineral/radioactive resources is completely missing from MOO2. The number of ships you can build in a given turn is not based on the resources you have available. Instead, it is based on production. In SEIV, a colony may not build anything for several turns in a row because you don't have enough minerals to let every colony build something every turn. But in MOO2, if you waste the production of a colony for even one turn, you are just being foolish. Each colony should *always* be producing a ship, facility, missile defenses, increased research or more gold.
Once I realized that, it began to bother me a great deal less that a brand new colony could build facilities just as fast as an established colony. There just isn't any concept of factories in this game. Is that a bad thing? Well, it does take some getting used to. But the resource based economy does make a bit more sense.
In MOO2, you had rich worlds which could build ships faster because of the mineral resources on the planet. In this game, the mineral resources from a single planet are spread throughout the entire empire--speeding production on ALL worlds instead of just one. Your goal is to knock out the enemy's main mineral producing planets--not because that planet is producing a ton of ships each turn as in MOO2 but because it is making it possible for the empire as a whole to produce them.
Ok, I still may start another topic whose title is 'Do colony ships build too fast' but this one message seemed to be about comparing two very different games so I changed the title of the topic to be more in line with my epiphany.
