[PvK]

Originally posted by Mylon:
Sure, it took Earth twice as long to build less than 18 cultural centers, but also consider Earth's population (the 6-7 billion mark we're at now is a pretty recent thing. It wasn't always like that!), our technology level (I assume a world that can build economical space ships would be able to produce more), and the fact that our planet is hardly a single entity of people like the united force a player controls in SEIV. Imagine what we could do if we stopped blowing each other up and built stuff together for a mere two centuries. I'd imagine we'd build those 18 cultural centers pretty quickly. I don't really expect homeworlds to build dreadnauts in one turn, but I would like to see production bonuses for larger populations increased to some degree to make facility building a little faster.

I'll give it a look, although it can be a bunch of work to re-do the population effect curve. Mainly though, as I said, I like the heavy constuction to be something that has to be built and maintained in space.

As for population transport... Why not make it more expensive to research level one and level two? The idea is that it still should be cheaper than building a battleship sized population transport in terms of research costs. A counter to the ease of population transport, as I've already suggested, is to decrease population reproduction and likewise increase the point cost of faster reproduction. This way an empire can spread faster, but not necessarily develop faster.

I don't quite follow what you're suggesting for a change to transport research costs. What do you mean?

As for reducing the reproduction rate, given the way population reproduction rate is calculated in SE4, I think it wouldn't be a very major effect. One has to have a certain minimum population before any difference in repro rates (besides 0% and "greater than 0%") will have on colonies without major population translocation.

The main reason I like cities is because of their compactness. One idea of making the city variants with much less hassle would be to only make 3 levels or so for each city. Instead of discovering a new city type each time you research applied research, mineral producion, applied intelligence, ect, given a new level of city when one level of every field is researched. Thus, the Metropolis Level 2 wouldn't appear until level 2 was reached in mineral production, applied research, applied intelligence, radioactives extraction, organics exctraction, and possily political science (on the grounds that urban pacification might help a little). Under this system, it might be wise to tone down the level 1 cities a little.

Ya, it's a reasonable idea. The SE4 upgrade system is still going to be somewhat problematic, though, since you can only upgrade along one path (and many players seem to like upgrading city->metropolis->etc), and the cost is always half the cost of building one from scratch.

Another idea would be to make a space yard-city combination in addition to the cultural world center that could possibly replace the space-cities that have a resupply depot built into them. This way one can bypass the 1-production limit by having one special production center and the rest of the buildings as other urban-type structures.

Yes, that's an interesting idea. Hmm. I wonder if it is possible to fool SE4's "one construction fac per planet" limit by upgrading from a fac without a SY to one that has one... that could be an interesting effect. Note though that if that does not work, then it will be impossible to build one of these cities on a planet that already has a shipyard.

PvK