[PvK]

PDF, Proportions is designed to try to be realistically slow, and to make research and colony development take so long that they require long-term strategic thinking.

For research speed, I am also trying to address what I see as two major issues with the standard set:

1) Research is way too fast in the standard set, which tends to reduce the usefulness of a large part of the tech tree. Low and intermediate tech levels are often not used by humans because it only takes a very short time to max out a tech, and so on. In Proportions, for most of the techs, you aren't even really expected to reach the highest level of very many of them in the course of an entire game. That way, in theory and hopefully in practive, research remains interesting and varied throughout the game.

2) The basic system where research labs ADD progress directly, and where an empire can focus ALL of its research on any project from month to month, is not at all accurate. Also, adding some research facilities on colony worlds just isn't going to multiply the rate of a civilization's tech progress. It may give it an important advantage, but it's not going to multiply it. This is why Proportions research facilities only produce small amounts of additive speed (per turn) compared to the entire homeworld.

While I think the pace is pretty close to realistic, it does also make the game advance pretty slowly, and there are some ways to change the pace of play without breaking the desired effects.

More powerful and expensive research facilities are probably in order. Foundations mod had those, but I took them out for simplicity and because they had interesting new tech requirements which weren't completely developed enough to add for Proportions. I'll look at adding something back in.

For faster-progressing games without breaking the basic Proportions model, I recommend:

1) Go to settings.txt and multiple the planet and homeworld value lines by up to 2.5 (the max that currently works for Homeworlds). i.e.:

Planet Value High Percent := 250
...
Plr Planet Value Low := 150
Plr Planet Value Medium Percent := 200
Plr Planet Value High Percent := 250

(this will only affect newly-started quadrants)

2) Set research cost to Low in game settings.

Those are a couple of easy ways. You can also of course also do multiple-homeworld starts, which directly multiplies the production and research rate, of course, but is also kind of weird having so many homeworlds.

PvK