It did occur to me some time ago that SE does not take 'man hours' (creature hours?) into account for production, just resources. It's not an "either/or" thing, you know. MOO uses "work" only and makes resources only a general influence, and SE uses only resources, but Stars! uses both. I prefer the Stars! production system and wish that SE could add "work" as a "fourth resource".
It's a glaring lack, in my opinion. Think about it. Right now, the only way to make something more expensive is to make it cost more resources. But very large things can sometimes be simple to build -- a WP "hull" is a bunch of steel-reinforced concrete, basically -- while small things can be very complex to build -- a mechanical watch hardly uses any 'resources' at all -- can you build one in a day?
Modern intergrated circuits -- "silicon chips" though they're not likely to be silicon much longer -- use very little resources but need LOTS of labor to create. The addition of the actual "work" necessary to produce various objects would allow a much more logical definition of high-tech components and facilities. Instead of costing huge amounts of resources, as they generally do NOT in RL, they would cost huge amounts of worker TIME to manufacture, as they in fact do in RL. This would solve the problem of brand new colonies being able to produce as much as fully populated worlds, btw. The "work unit" (creature hour?
) would NOT be universally distributed like material resources. It would be a fixed quantity on the given world. If each 1 million population produced a certain amount of "work" capacity, and facilities/components had an additional resource requirement of "work" necessary to produce them, then production ability would be much more balanced. Even more interesting, there might be a powerful incentive to use lower tech facilities on outlying worlds due to the lower construction requirements and you'd have the classic SciFi environment of "frontier" worlds and the inner 'urbanized' and sophisticated worlds.
This might be an excellent substitute for the "population required to operate one facility" setting that seems to be deactivated in the settings.txt file, too. It would be a cleaner way to limit planetary production of physical things while not restricting information resources like research and intelligence. It could have a fascinating affect in limited resource games, too. If techs were altered to not used more resources at higher levels but more "work" and LESS resources there would be huge pressure to get tech levels as fast as possible. A whole new kind of "budgeting" would enter into the game as you struggled to become as resource efficient as possible.
[This message has been edited by Baron Munchausen (edited 31 January 2001).]