[Graeme Dice]

If all you care about is the infrastructure, sure.

That's all that matters for producing materials and constructing ships. Such things would require next to no manpower for an advanced civilization like those in SE4.

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.

All of which are mostly irrelevant to automated processors, which already exist on ships, and are far more effective than a facility that covers half a continent.

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.

A planet only requires large amounts of resources from another planet if it cannot produce enough food to feed the population. We're talking about completely untouched planets, with material resources similar to Earth. There's no real reason to send anything to the planet past the initial colony set up materials unless the planet is extremely poor.

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.

If creating colonies that increase production by an order of magnitude bankrupts the empire, then Britain would have been bankrupted a hundred times over by now. Colonies represent untapped resources, and beyond a very short setup period would easily produce more than they take at the tech levels reached in SE4.

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.

Only for things that actually require population, like research, and creating more population.