[Graeme Dice]

With the right technology, that's true. However, notice you say "an advanced civilization like those in SE4." What represents that advanced civilization? In standard SE4, nothing. In Proportions, it's represented by the cultural centers. Without the cultural centers, you can have lots of industry, but who's going to provide the authority and direction to put it to use for an empire?

In standard SE4 the advanced civilization is represented by the facilities, after all, it's not going to take more than 10 million or so people in a single city to exploit most of the planet.

A real civilization is not going to "run out of room" at home, and "just need some land to build more factories", or at least, not to the extent abstractly represented by SE4.

I would think that all civilizations would do so at some point when their population grows beyond a standard point.

Technology is definitely not immune to environmental conditions. Try moving a Honda factory to Venus, and see how well it operates. Could one develop technology to do so? Yes, but it would require time, and experimentation with prototypes in that particular environment.

All that it would take to operate a Honda plant on Venus is a pressure dome. Venus has nearly the same gravity as Earth, so the machinery can be identical.

A planet consists of many different environments, and it takes years of study to understand them, let alone to develop technologies that function well in them. All of that takes time, intelligent research, and a lot of expense, especially if the planet is years away from your civilization even in the fastest ships your empire can produce.

At the start of the game, a ship can cross a solar system in two months. In the 1500's, a sailing ship could cross the Atlantic in two months. Futuristic explorers aren't going to be slower than ancient imperialists.

I can't think of any facility in Proportions, except for cultural facilities, which would cover half a continent.

Let's say Earth is the model for a medium sized planet, with about 20 facilities on the available land. That's equivalent to a single facility using just slightly less land than all of the U.S.

That's completely untrue. Try going to any of the planets in Earth's solar system. Try to find anything to eat. Try to find any consumer goods. Try to find breathable air.

There are plenty of planets in SE4 that have breathable atmospheres.

Try to find building materials. Try to find technological components. Try to find medicine. Ok, so maybe there's plenty of rock and unrefined iron. If you're lucky, you might be able to develop a process for gathering and processing some frozen indigenous water. How many million people were you planning on moving to this planet?

I was thinking about 10,000 to start, and give them about a decade or two to get the planet to the infrastructure to the point where it's not much more of a problem than building more houses.

[quote]What does it take to keep them alive and willing to be there? You expect them to breed and raise children educated there? You don't want them to form their own independant government? Also, for everything they need, how much does it cost to build, maintain and operate the fleet of transport equipment required to get all that stuff there?

How is a colony on a distant alien world going to increase production by an order of magnitude overnight? It seems to me it will mainly involve massive technological and logistical problems, which will at _least_ take a few decades to get up to speed. In Proportions, after just one decade, colonies can provide a major increase in production and other abilities. That seems pretty optimistic to me.

It seems very pessimistic to me. Remember that a single robo-miner has better mineral extraction performance than a mineral mine that covers the continental U.S.