[PvK]

Fryon, in most PBW games I've seen, players often do wait 100+ turns colonizing and researching everything in sight until they run out of things to develop and improve, before doing much fighting.

In Proportions, you can start building a war fleet more or less immediately, just based on the homeworld economy. Colonial development and research are the main things that are slower in Proportions, but:

1) Doing a lot of colonial development will actually slow down your war production.

2) Since research rate and resource production are not majorly affected by colonial development (as they are to a huge degree in the unmodded game), there is no need for a rat race to colonize and develop.

3) Since most tech areas can't be researched "to the end" in a practical amount of time in Proportions, the common un-modded practice of "waiting for the best stuff before doing anything, because the early stuff is obsolete before it sees action" doesn't make much sense in Proportions.

Of course, as with many aspects of Proportions, players may not realize the implications of all the changes, and may tend to stick to habits formed with the unmodded game, including thinking of the play cycle as the same way. Players who think the goal is to reasearch and colonize everything, might die of old age before they "complete" a game. On the other hand, I think JLS' group has completed several multiplayer games played with a the idea of having a quick war from the beginning.

In my PBW Proportions game, we're only about 100 turns in, and already one player homeworld has been lost to another player, and everyone seems to have a capable fleet. It's also a large quadrant. At closer quarters, we could have seen serious fighting even earlier.

PvK