[PvK]

To go into more detail on what Proportions does and what effects it has on play, much of what dogscoff describes is there, though there are some things which I may add from his ideas to the next Version.

Proportions is the first step towards my larger and more sweeping Foundations mod, so I haven't done nearly all that I set out to do, but currently, population are 1000 kT each and reproduce only annually, rather than each month, which removes the silly "minimum 1 million new civillians per month" reproduction rate. The population effects curves are dramatic and detailed at the low end. Resource production gets up to normal with fairly low population, so mining and research/intel colonies don't require billions, but construction only slowly rises throughout the curve. This means that it takes between two and three years to build a single resupply facility on a new colony, unless a huge armada of population transports comes along, and even then it takes a while. An interesting side effect is that event crises like core instabilities and even plagues (which I modded a bit) can be major important events that the player may want to build large exodus fleets to try to save population - and will have a really hard time evacuating much of a homeworld at all even with dozens of transports and a few years to evacuate.

Also, I greatly reduced the value of colony facilities while loading homeworlds with "Cultural Center" facilities which represent developed civilizations and give a lot of abilities, and would take an extremely long time to build on a colony world. Then there are intermediate urban facilities of various sizes which are fairly long-term investments but are attainable during a game and have a respectable output.

Pseudo-Newtonian propulsion and supply limits do have interesting effects, though not quite what dogscoff had in mind. My colony ships are 1800 kT (1500 taken by colony module), require 8 engines, and with ion engines can only make speed 2, which has similar effects to his vision of making colonies a long trip. They are expensive enough that they become a major part of the fleet budget if many are fielded at once, and of course they are very vulnerable if not escorted, because they are both weak and slow. The colony module itself gives cargo storage of 1000 kT, so it can carry one population unit. Only medium transports or starliners (new ship class) can carry a population unit, and the max for a transport is two or three. I had to reduce the capacity of cargo modules and unit launchers to balance this out.

Supply has become a major factor, and resupply depots are one of the most important things a colony can provide. On the other hand, the capital ship range limit described by dogscoff is not really in Proportions, because supply components are cheap - resupply ships become a useful design. I think in order to get the effect of limiting capital ships to developed systems, they will need to be slower and maybe need to have a supply cost from their ship size/class - I'll have to test if that's possible.

Small ships are quite useful in Proportions, however, because of the movement system, the size to-hit modifiers, the limited electronic warfare mods, reduced costs, and lower engine requirements.

The AI seems to handle it pretty well, although only in my latest (post-Gold) Version does it know what to build on colonies, which makes a huge difference. It also has a hard time dealing with the supply range limits in some cases, though I have been working on that with some success.

However I think still it would be best with only human players, also because capturing a home world would be a huge prize, and players would probably concentrate on trying to rob them from the AI. Cultural Centers do add a lot of cargo space though, and the AI does seem to build a truly formidable array of weapons platforms on them, so I think it's at least interesting to play against. I'm hoping when Gold is released and PBW restored, we can get a good multi-player game going to try it out.

PvK

Edit: corrected stats on colony ships

[ 27 January 2002: Message edited by: PvK ]