[Mylon]

Well I changed the supply requirements to 30 and 10 for the sphere and ringworld placement generators. So, when I tried activating my new sphereworld placement generator, it worked. Well, the surprising part about it working was that I only (Only!) had about 600-700 components in the sector, as opposed to the required 1,500. I would dare say that Proportions really breaks the limits inside the game itself.

I _think_ the magic number is on supplies 65,536, which would be 2^16, an unsigned (or positive-only) integer. That's the limit resource converters use and possibly applies to supplies as well. Yet it also baffles me because I would think the supply requirement would "wrap around" and end up as some number less than 65,536. From what I can figure, the supply available is 65,536, but the supply required is interpreted as a different size variable (and thus can exceed that).

As for the materials... I think that might be a signed variable of some kind and 1,000,000 and 2,000,000 causes some wrap-around. Thus, when the game does a check it sees, "Well, you have 50,000 and you need 45,000, so proceed." I think it would be so much easier to just make the components cost a huge amount and require 1 for the ringworld and 5-10 for the sphereworld. However, the net cost should not be the same -- I calculated (neglecting resource requirements) that I could have the components for the sphere world in a mere 180 turns by using a spaceyard on each component ship and having them build each other exponentially. So rather than decreasing the amount by 100 and increasing the cost by 100, increase the cost by only 2 to 5, so it takes about 50 turns to make one component.