QR has some good points, which I'll get to here, and I agree it would be good to add more big facilities. However I tend to disagree that the City is made obsolete by the Metropolis, or the Metropolis by the Megalopolis. Cities are better that Metropoli in the same sort of way that facilities are better than Cultural Centers - they take much less time to build, and so start producing much earlier, and tie up the planetary construction queue for much less time. This is why the AI was hopeless in 1.3 - it went straight for CC's on almost every colony. Generally, I think it makes sense to build several facilities on a planet, then build a city or two, then maybe build (or, in later patches, upgrade) to a Metropolis, etc.
BTW, the reason Metropolis and Megalopolis require any research is because of the technological difficulties of establishing space age ones, and everything needed to support them, on another planet that may not even be in the empire's home system. Existing technology for building large cities on the homeworld would be for the homeworld's familiar gravity, atmosphere, weather, and so on. It's not a massive research leap, but it does require some development of new technologies.
However, I'm not completely against re-examining the city build costs. When I've built them in my games, though, I didn't think the time was way off what I'd wanted it to be.
PvK
quote:
Originally posted by oleg:
QuarianRex has a point. Cultural facilities need some cost adjustments. To keep the spirit of this mod, namely the supreme importance of Homeworld, it would be nice to make some changes to decrease the cost of low level facilities but keep cultural center as it is. It takes only 3-4 turns to research Construction I and make Cities obsolete. At the same times it takes years and years to build even one city on any colony. I don't think it is right. Every unique and important steps in colony development needs some game time window to be useful and worthy to be build. I suggest to increase the research cost of megapolis (construction II ?) and decrease a bit the production cost of cities.