[PvK]

Originally posted by Mylon:
Yes, it may have taken America 300 years to get where we have today, but also consider:

1) It isn't a set thing. You can't say 300 years alter America has finally achieved "cultural center" status. Whos to say they didn't achieve it with the invent of the automobile? Or the railroads?

Since I defined cultural centers, I would say that the automobile would be a tech level achievement, not a facility, and that railroads were just part of the transportation infrastructure. They don't have that much to do with culture, although they may be a part of it, affect it, and certainly they would never have appeared without an advanced (essentially, European) civilization. I would say that building more than two facilities on a colony, or building a large facility like a resource production "complex", probably does involve developing a lot of transportation infrastructure, including the space-age equivalents of automobiles and railroads. These also will require tremendous amounts of design and engineering to develop survivable and effective Versions customized to operate in each planetary environment.

However, your question seems to be from a perspective that is still missing what I've been trying to explain about what culture is, and why there are cultural center facilities, and why they can't be built quickly. It's not that you couldn't, with a huge amount of work and materials, build the infrastructure of a civilized continent in a couple of decades. It's just that this would not be well represented by another cultural center facility in SE4. This is because culture contributes things that the duplication of does not result in an additive effect, the way the SE4 game engine would add them together. 1000 scientists will not develop the same technology 10 times as quickly as 100 scientists working from the same principles. Not to mention that building a bunch of lab space on a distant planet is not going to have an direct additive effect, either. Who here believes that in the future, we won't have enough real estate for all the science labs we need, and that by colonizing Mars and filling it with science labs, we could triple the rate of human scientific accomplishment, compared to having the labs and scientists stay on Earth with the same budget?

And that's only the research part.

2) Production is skewed by the fact that only one thing can be produced at a time. Such infrastructure as a city doesn't spring up overnight, but it also isn't the only focus of the people.

Yes, that's very true. Unfortunately for the golden ideal of completely accurate simulation, that's the way SE4 production works.

3) Cost is also skewed because colonies are self sustaining in nature. True, America has maybe consumed its own weight in organics, but sustaining the colonists is free in SEIV because they produce enough naturally to take care of themselves. It is production facilities or other things that cost extra.

Also true, and again, unfortunately there's no great way to do this in SE4 except to give the facilities large costs, or possibly to give them negative resource production (though this latter idea is marred by the obligatory multiplication by planet value).

4) They're also evolving things. It would be reasonable that if a new mining technique is discovered you shouldn't have to build half of the cultural center over again just to refine one part. The 50% cost factor may be unavoidable, but the tremendus cost of that very 50% assures that it will never happen (assuming multiple levels of cultural facilities).

Yep. Although, what you can do is build other facilities from the higher tech on the same planet, such as robotoid facotories, value improvement plants, computer complexes, etc. These have multiplicative effects with whatever else is on the planet, and don't have to have massive costs. This is probably what I should add more of, rather than struggling with the cost/upgrade system provided by SE4, which doesn't leave me much flexibility beyond what I've already done.

PvK