quote:
Originally posted by PDF:
Hello,
I started playing SE4 Last week and already feel somewhat addicted, I couldn't resist trying all the mods and new races I saw ... thus I started 4 games but didn't progress very far in either 
...
Colonizing a new planet up to nearly-full capacity (at a given tech level) is a matter of 5-6 turns, 10 at most : send colony ship, add a pop trans (300 M population per ship, that's the USA whole population moved in amonth !! 
), pop up 5 facilities at the rate of 1/turn, and in perhaps 2 game years a whole system has been colonized..
That's overly quick and easy ! And population is mainly useless, as facilities need nearly to noone to operate properly : how in hell can 10 M people produce more than 50% of what 2000 M people can do ???
Same for research : to max out RP the best way is to populate each colony with lots of Research Facilities... That really doesn't sound logical, science should need proper infrastructure, support, all what we on Earth worked for centuries to have here !
I supposed that for a long time my homeworld would give most of the empires economic output, now in a couple of years it's just an overpopulated big colony ... I know Proportion mod changes this but didn't try yet (cf above 
).
And so the game tends too much towards "colony race" so as to have more planet "slots" just to put facilities, where it should be more oriented towards making in the long run viable colonies out of harsh places, IMHO that'll be more fun and challenging.
With a better economic model the game would be just *more than great*
Your thoughts ?
Some simple changes to settings.txt can reduce these problems. Change population growth rate for example. ANd change default planet build rate to make colony development slow down.
Empire Base Planet Mineral Usage Rate := 1000
Empire Base Planet Organic Usage Rate := 1000
Empire Base Planet Radioactive Usage Rate := 1000
This makes a level III extraction facility (mineral, organic, or radioactive) take THREE turns to build on a new colony. Adding population will speed it up, but not nearly as much as with the original default build rate.