[PvK]

QuarianRex, the Proportions test games I've played haven't gone much longer than 200 turns, but that's just for lack of time to spend playing. The game could keep playing probably for 1000 turns or more, and there would still be plenty to develop, plenty to fight over, and probably plenty left to research. Although perhaps not many players will manually play a game 1000 or more turns long, they could, without having the game system break down the way it does in the standard game due to exhaustion of planetary spaces, exhaustion of the tech tree, and/or domination of the empires with the largest number of colonies.

I've never finished building a Cultural Center in a Proportions, but the cost of those was supposed to be prohibitive, or nearly so, within the time of a typical game. With a time scale of ten turns to the year, a game of Proportions that might take 200-300 turns (20-30 years) would and should represent not the complete development and explotation of an entire star cluster, with empires toppling left and right, but simply a period of conflict and expansion between fledgeling alien spacefaring races to determine the future of the qudrant. That future might even be theoretically playable using this mod, to an extent, but yes, at 10 turns to the year, the play time required would be huge/prohibitive... but that seems appropriate to me, for the time scale.

In 20 years in a standard SE4 game, frequently the whole quadrant is pretty much colonized, and more or less the whole tech tree can be learned. That's a better pace for doing everything the game has to offer in a reasonable amount of play time. It doesn't seem true at all to life or fiction, though.

By the way, with the new auto-turn-running program, it could be quite interesting to let the AI (especially, if I tweak it some more) play Proportions for 1000 turns or so, and then start playing, to give a scenario with already established tech and colonies and so on.

Now, before getting into details, I'd like to be clear that I do see what you're saying, and I don't mean to say Proportions' current values are all correct and shouldn't be changed. I think they could probably use a lot of adjustment and development. Mainly, I think players can and should adjust the game to suit their tastes, and in some ways the development pace in Proportions goes from SE4's extremely fast, to an extremely slow one. The game might be more fun for more players if the planetary development scale were accelerated, but I tend to think that going half-way would be a "Proportions (Faster)" variant.

Anyway, back to cultural centers taking 70-100+ years to build new ones. You equated this to industrializing a planet, but that's not how I see a cultural center. If you take Earth in a few hundred, or a thousand, years, when it has hopefully got its act together and is ready to actually try to explore and maybe settle other planets in earnest, each single cultural center on Earth (in Proportions) would represent something like North America, Europe, South America, Japan, China, Russia, Africa, SE Asia, the Middle East, India (let's see that's ten), and maybe two for all of the other nations and cultures. Now imagine that a meteor strike, planetary napalm, or other massively destructive event completely annihilates one of these - only charred dirt is left (or worse, only irradiated blind refugees are left - hundreds of millions of them, pleading for help). What is the effect going to be on world trade, world culture, politics, goods, technology, culture, religion, psychological effects on the surivors, etc? It would be something never before seen in history. How long would it take to "replace" this? I'm not talking about just replacing factories, human bodies, roads and buildings, but about replacing the damage to world culture and the way everything is done. I haven't even mentioned environmental damage, but that's partly because I also mean just to consider what it would take to build a new civilization on an alien world.

I need to interrupt myself at this point, but it suffices to say that I see "industrializing" a planet as filling it with facilities and adding a city or two and maybe a spaceport or other stuff. That doesn't take all that long, relatively speaking, in Proportions.

To build a whole new culture on an alien world, I would equate this to building say, eight cities, two research complexes, a space port, and a distribution center. Especially with transport support to build up population, I expect this would be achievable during a typical game. Note that its abilities would more or less equal or exceed a homeworld colony center. This colony is just much less compact than a CC, and some of the bonuses are less, which to me reflect the difficulty of developing an entire planet, and of trying to duplicate a civilization on an alien world far from the homeland.

To answer your PS, the reason I removed construction ability from CC's was because of SE4's hard-coded limit of one construction facility per planet (after initial placement). Without doing this, a homeworld was unable to build a higher-tech shipyard, or to build urban facilties that included construction, and no more than one of such could be built on a colony. I agree it was a neat effect, but I also didn't mind the reduction in ship building rate.

PvK