[PvK]

Thanks for all the feedback, bstripp, ZeroAdunn, and everyone. I'm glad people are enjoying the mod so well. I knew I'd like these sorts of changes myself, but I wasn't sure how many other players would, particularly because it does slow down the speed of development so much.

bstripp, I think I do like to 10-turn population growth settings. You can easily change it for your own games by changing settings.txt, of course. The reasons I prefer 10 to 3-5 are that it's more or less on par with human growth rates, and because I think it's about right from the games I have played in terms of the very intentional goal of the mod to make it take an extremely long time, or an extreme amount of tech and resources, to do what happens way too easily in the standard game: mutliplying like ants and turning every colony into a fully-developed world in a few years' time. Also, by setting the repro rate to 1/10, it doesn't make it impossible to build up a planet quickly; it just makes it take a lot of effort. One thing Proportions makes a lot easier is being able to make cheaper ships with lesser capabilities (instead of it nearly always being best to build maxed-out warships, and auxiliary ships costing as much or more than a warship). In this case, if you build a large fleet of transports (like wr8th suggested, 20 or more) and set them to ferry population out to the colonies, you can get their populations up pretty quickly. By keeping the repro rate at 1/10th though, it means this effort is more or less required to build up an important colony. If you turn the rate back to 1/3 - 1/5, then colonies that you just visit once with a colony ship will develop a lot faster. If you prefer a faster rate of development with less effort required, though, please feel free (of course) to alter any of the settings anywhere in the mod. I do appreciate everyone's suggestions and reports of experiences and so on. You folks have given some terrific feedback.

cascalonginus, no, I don't have a Version for SE4 1.49 (pre-Gold), because I developed this for the Gold edition. There are also a couple of things that would not work so well in pre-Gold, although it could be retrofitted to work in 1.49. For instance, 1.49 doesn't have either of the abilities to change population size or repro rate, so it would be a lot harder to get the same effect on limiting colonies in 1.49. If I had the time to work on that, I'd probably re-do the population effect curves, and so on, to compensate for that weaknesses. Rather though, I really recommend getting the Gold edition of SE4 - I think it's a major improvement over 1.49 and well worth the price.

PvK