[PvK]

csebal said:
Well, my point was, that you esentially nerfed the sh*t out of planet improvement facilities, by increasing their cost dramatically, it would be 'unfair' to leave easy to access, and extremely cheap system wide planet improving tech in the game for those who go with a certain racial tech area.

By the same kind of reasoning, any unique racial ability is 'unfair', and they all have unique abilities. The real question is whether it is unbalanced. If I turn the Nature Shrine down to 1-2% instead of max 3%, I don't think it's unbalanced at all. Even at 3%, it only looks unbalanced to me if you are in a game with peace for the first 250 turns or so, and against players who won't gang up on you to take your extra-valuable planets. In other words, even as it was, it wasn't unbalanced, it was just a pretty strong very long-term strategy that required Religious racial tech. Temporal players can also try a long-term superiority strategy with, say, temporal space yards. Psychics could try a long-term intel dominance strategy with their unique psychic intel abilities. Organics can try a long-term superiority strat with their replicant centers. Crystallines can try one by making a ringworld out of one star in a trinary system and filling it with crystalline solar generators. Anyone can try an early game blitz strategy against any of those, and will have a 1500-racial point advantage, and be able to concentrate on weapons of conquest rather than long-range investments.

With the increased price, building multiple improvement buildings is most probably out of question, you'll be happy, if you manage to build just one, so the fact, that the nature shrines do not stack is not that big of a disadvantage.

Yes, this is a good point. I needed to review the numbers. Thanks for bringing it to my attention!

Im not saying they should cost the same as regular tech facilities, but compared to the price of a simple value improvement plant I, even the nature shrine III can be considered 'free'.

If a 4-year investment by a strong colony can be considered 'free' from a certain perspective, then I suppose so.

FFS, the value impro plant III is more expensive than the arcology (with arcology being 350k iirc)

Good observation. Question is, of course, how long should it take to build a Value Improvement Plant? What is a Value Improvement Plant, really, anyway? How desirable is it for players to be able to simply ADD value to any planet in a linear fashion (since it lets them essentially change the map)? Etc.

and even the arcologies have a build time, thats beyond reasonable (see my previous post about the 100-150 turn barrier).

Then again, im not the average proportions user, in my own games, i always mod your mod to some extent, for example by increasing the pop growth rate somewhat, modifying various building stats (recently, i've completely readjusted the colonial facilities of 3.0 to fit my taste, changed the way research facilities are spread on the tech tree, etc...)

Maybe i should stop posting stuff like that. Simply because my opinion is rather alone on the thread - havent seen too many Posts arguing with what i said - , and i feel it may be influencing you in a way, other Users of the mod may not like.

Lets just say, i'll stick to bug reporting, and will try not to come up with suggestions on how to make the mod better for my taste
...

Ya it sounds like you prefer a slightly faster pace than the design parameters of Proportions, which I can certainly understand. Good to know.

Your comments and observations have been quite helpful. Thanks, and please let me know if you have any further feedback!

PvK