PvK:
Just wondering, how long are your usual games anyway?
You advise patience, and I do understand this, I tend to go for the long haul myself, but have you ever actually built a colony cultural center? Ye Gods man! If you have done so you must have the enlightened patience of the Buddha himself!
As far as 100 years being a barely reasonable time frame for industrialization I must disagree. That may be somewhat accurate for a pre-industrial tech level but the more advanced things get, the faster they happen. It may have taken the states @100 years to reach viability and break away from its parent, but it only took Russia 40 years to go from a virtually fuedal state to a cold war superpower, and it has only taken India a little over a decade or so of foreign aid to get to the point of aquiring nuclear capability. That is a lot of development in an extrenely short period of time that just got shorter with the improvement of tech (among other things).
Also, if you want to take the states/colony analogy a little further you would have to factor in the initial -90% construction rate for low population that gradually increased through reproduction and immigration (and there wasn't any fleet of large starliners shuttling people either). And to be fair you would have to include in that 100 years all the time spent as little more than an organics farming facility (perhaps with some minerals thrown in). Overall it would take far less than a century to construct an equivalent cultural center in an area with a more dense starting population or similarly advanced neighbors (ie. lower consruction penalties).
What I'm trying to say here is that while development of a colony world should be difficult it would be nice if it were actually a realistic possibility. And I'm not talking about filling it up with cultural centers either. For a large breathable colony world with a pop of 500 (a somewhat reasonable goal with -17% to construction), level one shipyard, and no other racial or cultural SY bonuses to fill all 20 slots with cities it would take @480game turns. And that is just for basic cities. To do the same with metropoli (is that the plural?) would take over 1200 game turns. Which, by the way, is the time it would take to make a single cultural center(!). Checking my current game, using a race with severe SY bonuses it would take over 700 turns to replace a single cultural center on my homeworld!
It seems as though you are thinking of colonies as space based extensions of the wild west with prospectors and uneducated settlers trying to eke out an existence and barely able to get ahead. This isn't the case with colonies. These are going to be populated by trained, driven individuals (slackers aren't likely to leave the soft comforts of their home planet) who arive with all the benefits (if not the resources) of the advanced technology of their homeworld.
Even if the cost of cultural centers was dropped to 400k it would still not even come near to overshadowing a homeworld. On a colony with 1000 pop (no SY penalty) it would take 200 turns to produce just one. And even a couple out there spread among your best colonies would be a nice little trophy, letting the unwashed masses of alien rabble know that you are indeed bringing civilization to the galaxy
.To fill a large world would take 4000 turns, and if you have the patience for that you are a far more dedicated gamer than I (or are perhaps in some form of coma that allows you to hit the end turn button over and over...).
I'm not saying that anything should be made easy (that would be no fun) but as it is, the keenest of facilities, the cultural center, is just unattainable eye candy.
By the way, why did you remove the ship yard bonuses from the cultural centers? I thought that that was a really interesting idea, further emphasizing the importance of a homeworld (and ensuring that the AI had a couple hundred defense satelites in orbit by turn 3
).
P.S. for the cargo thing, I do not consider a fleet of 89 massive starliners to be a single high tech ship, just a more realistic alternative for planetary evacuation/transport than the 300+ ship fleet that would otherwise be needed for the same job (and those were under some pretty optimal conditions).