[PvK]

Ok. I'll add this to the documentation for the mod, too.

1) Homeworld development.

There are several possible options for homeworld development. Usually you have 2-3 slots for facilities that are not cultural centers (depending on whether you took Natural Merchants or not).

One of these is the Shipyard, which is important at least for the first year or two because it will be the fastest shipyard you have, so it's good for cranking out construction bases, colony ships, and, well, anything else you want to build in a hurry to get yourself set up. Once you have a mess of construction bases and/or are starting to have a budget close to your income, it may be worthwhile to actually scrap the homeworld shipyard in order to put something else there (at least for a while) in order to take advantage of the population and cultural bonuses of the homeworld - a facility on the homeworld is more productive than one on most colonies.

The other one or two facilities an empire will start with are a Space Port (Distribution Center) and a Resupply Depot, both of which are almost completely redundant, and give you choices for what you'd like to boost a bit. A quick option is just to add a couple of facilities (perhaps research) at first. In Version 2.1, a city will take less than two years on a homeworld (Metropolis about four), and may be worth it once you don't really need the fast homeworld construction queue for other projects. There will probably be some more options in 2.2. Building a training facility and scapping it some turns later can let you train your defense bases and ships hanging out at the homeworld.

More options appear after some research. Anything that improves the output of the entire planet will have a very strong effect. You can get a major increase to research, intel, or resource production this way. A good long-term option is a value improvement plant.

Once higher-tech shipyards are developed, it may be good to upgrade or rebuild the homeworld shipyard in order to build a more expensive facility quickly (like a city), or to replace major fleet losses quickly.


2) Colony development.

Increasing the population of colonies is vital to accelerate their development. The most effective way to do this is to build a fleet of population transports, and concentrate on a few specific colonies rather than trying to develop all of your colonies into developed worlds at once. Production climbs steeply with the first few population gains, up to about 5-8 million, at which point any production facilities built can be run at nearly full capacity. Construction rate increase is a much slower curve, that starts out fast but starts to slow at about 70 million (where it's only 48%) - the next 52% construction are gained on the way up to a 1 billion population, so more is better but somewhere in the 50-200 million range, it may be efficient to switch to building up another colony with your transports, instead. It sort of depends on what your goals are - you have to decide how many "big" colonies you want to concentrate on.

As far as what to build on colonies, I try to focus on themes, and start by getting what I need most urgently (like a space port or resupply depot - for many races, a space yard will also increase development rate, and so should often be built first). After urgent items, it makes sense to nearly fill up on the relatively cheap space-wasting facilities, and then start chewing on more expensive ones. Colonies that don't get a bunch of population, though, should probably be developed as outPosts - a good place to build a few useful facilities like a resupply depot, shipyard, store a bunch of units, etc.

A resupply depot on an outpost is much more important in Proportions than in the standard game because of the strong trade-offs in ship design between speed and range, so fast ships tend to be short ranged... unless their empire has a good network of resupply depots to bounce off of, in which case suddenly their fast defense ships can zoom around without being crippled by low range. The new supply effects in Gold 1.67 make this even more important. Suddenly, apparently silly little moons with a resupply depot and some defenses, can become major strategic assets, determining where the empire's fleet can be effectively deployed, or not.

Ship yard outPosts are similarly important for the usual reasons, but also more so because in Proportions, you can't "just fill up some more huge planets with resource facilities in a year or two" and suddenly be able to maintain a whole new fleet. The savings of a maintenance-free shipyard compared to a construction base are significant.

For defenses, at first, it's usually fastest and most efficient to build defenses at the homeworld or on construction bases, and then ship them to the colonies, so the colonies don't have to tie down their own queues (which they're generally really bad at, anyway). The main exception would be emergencies, and maybe having the colonies spend a turn or two on infantry, so they can't be easily snatched by aliens.


3) It can sometimes take the AI's a while to build colonies, but yes, they do. The 2.1 AI's seem to sometimes not really get started colonizing for a few years, but then get into it about year 5 or 6. An example game at year 9 has eight AI empires with 69 colonies between them (the Toltayans lead with 15). As of Proportions 1.5, they even build fairly reasonable things on them, establishing a resupply network so they can defend them reasonably, etc.


PvK