[PvK]

Originally posted by Graeme Dice:

quote:

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Originally posted by PvK:

"18 of them? Well at 100 years a piece, that's only 1800 years. It took Earth more than twice that long to produce substantially fewer than that."

Not really. We've gone from pure agricultural to our modern infrastructure in about 200 years.

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If all you care about is the infrastructure, sure. Of course, on the homeworld, there is the advantage that it is the correct atmosphere (composition, pressure, and weather), radiation levels, bioshpere, gravity, and temperature. Overcoming these is part of the massive challenge of creating a productive colony on an alien planet.

A Proportions Cultural center represents more than simply industry and infrastructure, however. It represents the culture, society, history, art, drama, economy, as well as the environment that makes it possible to run and sustain large-scale production, reasearch, and so on so that the planet actually contributes to an empire rather than sucking massive resources just to keep it in existence.

In particular, one of the reasons homeworld research centers are so highly rated compared to colony ones, is because I reject the SE4 premise that research is an additive and transitive phenomenon. Two labs do not research subject A twice as fast as one, and chemistry lab C cannot be switched to researching Applied Intelligence on a moment's notice, nor will it stop researching chemistry because Emperor Juvenile III insists that Political Puppets must be obtained ASAP. So, having cultural centers that cannot be replaced and multiplied during a typical game session, provides a base level of research ability that all empires have, and which will not be warped out of proportion simply by colonizing a hundred alien worlds and mass-producing labs, which is both unrealistic (IMO) and unbalancing.

The ability in itself to multiply your empire's abilities in a few years' time by colonizing alien worlds and turning them into homeworld clones is exactly what Proportions' design premise rejects. Actually attempting such in reality would, it seems to me, lead to complete bankruptcy, so Proportions is actually still quite generous in this from a realism standpoint, in that it can actually still be very worthwhile to do so. It's just not like the standard game, where it's so easy to clone your homeworld that the balance of power hinges on the ability to colonize as fast as possible.

With the change I requested to max homeworld planet value settings in 1.78, however, I might be able to re-do the way some of this works for Proportions 3.0, however. It would probably make sense that homeworlds should have an intrinsically higher value than any alien world, due to the natural habitat.

An advanced space-faring society shouldn't need large populations to create great amounts of resources anyways, as those kinds of things can be automated.

True. That's one reason I made the Proportions population effects curve level out pretty drastically after the first 30 million or so.

PvK

[ September 16, 2002, 04:37: Message edited by: PvK ]