[PvK]

Originally posted by Mylon:
Keep in mind that 500 turn figure was a for a rance with a 45% bonus to space yard construction. Even if it was 50 turns for a hardy industrialist, how many would you expect to see? They'd still cost 240kT of materials (!) and drain a significant amount of resources from the empire. At 50 turns each, seeing homeworld clones wouldn't be very likely, since it would still take 900 turns to build as many cultural centers. 90 years may seem a too little to reproduce what Earth has done, but consider this for playability. Earth has had 100 year long wars, maybe some longer ones, but a vanilla game can easily be resolved in 50 years or less. Isn't that a little fast for a war of galatic scale?

Heck, now that I think about it, even 50 turns seems a little long.

Well, these are mostly "playability" concerns. Ya, it can be more exciting to play a faster game. There's a lot of distance between Proportions' pacing (quite slow, but still generous compared to my sense of what would be realistic) and that of the standard set (very fast-paced, so it's actually possible to conquer and terraform hundreds of solar systems, and master all sciences, in a matter of decades). I was actually surprised that so many players liked Proportions' pacing so well. I'd expect most players to prefer something between the two, and many do, and of course people are free to mod and adjust my mod to suit their tastes, and the game settings and settings.txt can easily be used to make major adjustments.

As for some of your specific points:

* SE4 isn't galactic in scale. Even if you use a 255-system quadrant, which is a HUGE game from a gameplay perspective, 255 systems isn't very much of a galaxy. Drive out away from city lights on a clear night and check out the sky. One estimate of the number of stars in our own galaxy is 100 BILLION (100,000,000,000). This would probably take very many SE4 turns to colonize.

* SE4 is a game with roughly month-long turns, individual spaceships (and satellites, and fighters) which resolves combat down to the single weapon shot, and so on. It can take an hour or more to play each turn later in the game. The game generally starts with players having a homeworld and zero units. It's not really reasonable and realistic, if you take the time-scale literally, to expect to be able to conquer and colonize to the extent that the unmodded game set allows, in any playable amount of time. The unmodded game does allow players to fully develop and conquer a large quadrant in a matter of decades. Proportions doesn't. That's "by design." You can still have very interesting expansion and conflict in Proportions, and you could conquer and dominate all of the other players. You probably won't ever build a cutural center, but you're not supposed to. Cultural centers represent more than just the industry and physical structure of a civilization. You CAN multiply your production and research capacity through colonization, eventually. However, even that isn't necessarily required to dominate a quadrant.

* Since the time frame of a game of SE4 is limited to a few decades of game time (unless you say the turns are actually a year long, or something), what you can expect in Proportions is to be able to establish a few pretty large colonies and a fairly large number of outPosts, but to have to decide how much effort to devote to developing those, and how much to develop a military force. There can still be large-scale conflicts, and there generally are. But there is much less necessity to do lightning colonization and expand or become quickly insignifigant.

Some of the design goals of Proportions include:

To allow the game to continue with interesting goals and technologies to discover, even after many decades of play. Most technologies should usually not be researched to their highest levels, and most colonies should still have room to improve (and remain inferior to a homeworld) even after many decades.

Late in the game, the remaining undamaged homeworlds should still be the most powerful planets, but there should be some very valuable and formidable colonies. However, most planets should still be either uncolonized, or relatively undeveloped, compared to the highly populated and developed colonies. That is, if a colony is started but no particular effort is made to develop it (mainly by shipping a bunch of population there), it shouldn't have developed into a major colony just because some years have passed without any particular effort to build it up - i.e., it takes deliberate effort (population transport) to create a major colony.

PvK