[Graeme Dice]

It seems to me from this statement, and from what you've said before, that you see an SE4 colony as simply a military/industrial or research complex. In that case, sure, I agree. That's why I have the population curve for production set to sharply curve at a very low number like this. Yes, you only need a few million people, or even droids, if you just want to operate, say, resource extraction facilities, and it won't do all that much poorer than a planet with 4 billion people and the same facilities.

It will produce significantly less material resources when it should be producing significantly more due to the fact that the planet is untouched. There has not been several thousand years of resource depletion to cause the planet to be producing a shadow of its former resources.

Where we differ, is that you seem to think that that is all that can be done with a planet, or that terraforming and civilizing are trivial and pointless additions. My opinion is that developing a planet from a workshop into a homeworld equivalent evolves many orders of magnitude more. The return on investment is much more shallow, though the potential per planet is eventually greater.

No, I think that such development will occur as a natural part of the colonization process, and that it will happen quickly and painlesly enough that it doesn't really need to be considered as a major expenditure.

I'm not questioning whether it appens at all, but the extent and proportions to which it happens, and the costs, effects, and time involved. Personally, I don't think, for example, that say, Oxford University's contribution to the advancement of Earth's technology and other intellectual fields (yes, there are many others) would be doubled if we could only find another few square Km somewhere to build a replica. Do you?

Oxford's contributions to technology in the Last decade have been miniscule when compared to all the contributions from every other research lab.

For another example, suppose we find a really rich iron or even petrolium deposit on Mars - how cost-effective do you think it's going to be to develop an extraction plant and transport infrastructure to take advantage of this?

I think that the transport infrastructure will be essentially free. Send an automated robot team to an asteroid with a higher than average concentration of iron and nickel with some water in the vicinity if possible. Have them build a fusion engine with the materials found there, and push the asteroid into orbit where you build a space elevator. Bring some more ice asteroids into orbit for fuel for the fusion engines you are constructing to strap onto mineral packets. The only expenditure is the initial cost to build the robots because you have essentially unlimited resources to work with.

How many years did it take to develop the unmanned probe to Mars that crashed because someone had a math error converting Imperial units to Metric, and how much did that cost?

It cost only around $150 million dollars, and took less than five years to develop. By the time a SE4 game starts, the people have faster than light drives, and spaceships that can travel across solar systems with a full crew within a single month. Their level of technology is far, far ahead of ours.

That's a huge over-simplification, it seems to me. For just a few examples:

You need to develop a pressure dome that can withstand the particular conditions of that environment, meaning you have to find out exactly what that environment is like (pressure, temperature, chemical effects, weather phenomena and patterns, volcanic activity, indigenous life forms), meaning you have to guess and then establish an outpost to conduct research, then develop and produce the dome and required life support for it.

That would be why it takes 500,000 research points to obtain a colonization technology. Sure the research might take a while, but once it's been done once it doesn't need to be done again.

(For example, it took Earth eleven years and ten probes to get Venera 8 to operate on the surface of Venus. Two years later, Venera 9, and three years later, Venera 10, each succeeded in returning single photographs, before the specially-designed-to-survive probes were destroyed after about 50 minutes each. That was 1975. Since the first probe attempt in 1961, it's been 41 years [~410 SE4 turns], and we still haven't landed anyone on Venus or Mars, let alone planned to build Hondas there.)

The probes Lasted for only 50 minutes because the electronics of the day couldn't survive at those kinds of temperatures. Now we have chips that can survive at 200 degrees Celsius indefinitely. Venus is around 462 degrees C, so give us a few more decades and we'll have chips that can survive there. Of course, by the time we have FTL drives and ships with the lowest tech propulsion systems of proportions, we will be around the year 3000 ourselves.

Then, your Earth-based factory is not a self-contained unit. It takes advantage of Earth infrastructure such as power plants, communications, plumbing, the availability of parts and materials, not to mention the necessities for human life (housing, food, and incentive for people to exist near the factory), and transportation networks (roads, trucks, rails, ships, harbors) to deliver the goods to somewhere useful.

Humans are only necessary for an automobile plant because the robots currently need someone to supervise them, and because it's bad politics to fully automate production. Give us 1000 years, and we'll be building fully automated production facilities. As for the infrastructure, most of it is unnecessary when you have a tiny population. For communications inside a solar system, you need a kilowatt to megawatt transceiver, which an amateur radio operator can build out of catalog parts. For power, you use the core of your colonization ship, after all, if it can push a megaton across a planetary system in five to ten months, it will produce enough power to run a rather large city.

Another example of a major obstacle is going to be climate and atmosphere. So you've got a dome - how do you maintain an Earthlike atmosphere and conditions inside it, considering you want to run a factory complex inside it?

This is a non-issue if you have a water supply anywhere in the system. With free electricity from fusion plants (and antimatter and quantum reactors in SE4), all you need is a bunch of water to produce as much oxygen as you need. If you don't breath oxygen, then you use some other reaction. Burn things to produce CO2, skim gas giants for H2, or pump it out for none.

Another consideration is that building Hondas on Venus isn't going to help Earth unless there is storage and a transportation system in place, and if it's not more efficient than just building another factory on Earth, then it's a net loss. Getting the materials to Venus, and getting the Hondas back from Venus, is surely going to cost huge amounts in rocket fuel and other space transportation expenses.

You don't transport raw materials to a colony, they use what's already there and send it back to the mother planet. For transportation, all you need are a bunch of water/rock asteroids with fusion engines built on them and automated control centres. You have an essentially infinite fuel supply, and no maintenance costs.

Even these are just a few examples - the specifics would be much more complex and daunting, not to mention expensive and time-consuming. Perhaps not insurmountable, eventually, but certainly not trivial, nor the sort of thing that can be accomplished in a month, without any overhead costs.

Not a month certainly, but definetly within a decade, and while producing a net profit at the same time. A new colony should have a net research boost to the whole civilization immediately, as it is inventing the technologies necessary to sustain itself.

[/quote]I guess I wasn't clear. When I wrote "especially if the planet is years away from your civilization even in the fastest ships your empire can produce", that was just a reference to the way SE4 doesn't take distance into acount when figuring empire revenues from colonies. A colony on the far side of the quadrant will contribute just as much to the imperial coffers as one in the home system. However, I didn't mean to say that travel time was the only determining factor in colony production. Even if it were, imagine if SE4 tracked expenses not just for warships but for transports for resources. Even a standard game Escort with a couple of cargo bays is pretty expensive to maintain, and that accounting is highly simplified. I'm not saying that's an accurate representation of costs, but still, it shows the sort of thing I was talking about. If you had to build and maintain escorts to move the resources produced by the colonies, you could see how it could quickly become expensive or even counter-productive to try to build an economy spread out across many solar systems.[/quote]

That's because you don't build military capable ships to haul cargo. You take entire asteroids, or something similar, hollow them out and use the materials to build the engines, stick a computerized brain in them, add water, and let them travel along hauling resources around. SE4 works on an accrual basis, resources are counted as soon as they are produced, no matter how long it takes to get them to the location they are needed.

Military ships have to be able to accelerate quickly, which requires balanced designs. They need materials which can handle the high stresses of combat maneuvers, advanced weaponry, and most expensive of all, a highly trained crew. Cargo ships require an engine and somewhere to strap the stuff you want to carry.

[/quote]As I've said many times on previous threads, and I think on this one too, I don't think it makes any sense to equate planet slots directly to surface area, and hopefully it's obvious that Proportions' facilities do not all represent items that take up the same amount of space. Only the cultural centers are described as continental in size. The facilities just represent facilities, whereas the complexes are complexes of many facilities, but even the Megacomplexes would not, I think, require continental areas. What I do think they require is environment research and development, infrastructure, life support, etc etc. It seems to me, as I've discussed at length, that there are major obstacles and requirements to overcome before a net gain to the empire is achieved. These are (very abstractly) represented in Proportions by the construction costs and the population construction rate curve.[/quote]

It seems to me though, that the costs involved with creating a colony in proportions far outstrip what they would be in actuality, especially for worlds that have breathable atmospheres.

[/quote]Just because a planet has the same basic type of atmosphere as your native atmosphere, doesn't make it breathable. Suppose Venus had an Oxygen-Nitrogen atmosphere. Let's be very generous and say it's even about the same proportion of gasses, and there are no toxic particles or other components. Great, but Venus surface atmosphere is 100 x Earth's pressure, and 600-700 degrees Celsius.[/quote]

Utterly wrong. If Venus had the same atmospheric composition as Earth it would have a surface temperature just slightly greater than ours because there would be no runaway greenhouse effect. Many of the gases would condense at the same time and reduce the atmospheric pressure to a more manageable level.

Instantly pressure-cooked before anyone can say "Honda." Sounds like a great place to build a new civilization. It should only take a couple of years, right?

For a planet to have the same type of atmosphere as your home planet it would almost certainly have a similar type of environment. For example, an atmosphere with free oxygen requires photosynthesis or some other chemical reaction to keep the highly corrosive oxygen from doing what it has already done to Mars.

Ok, so you're saying the actual people can be few, because they can control robots who do the actual work. That seems reasonable, but I would say it would be represented by population units in the game.

Then the rate of growth is far too low, and should be well over 10-20% per year, because robots don't require two decades to mature.

How much of a population unit is actual people, and how much is droids and equiment and supplies and so on, is abstracted. So how much machinery, equipment, supplies, and machinery are you expecting to need? It too is going to need fuel and spare parts and other materials. Just exploring and studying the environment is going to take a long time, not to mention designing and engineering solutions.

If you can live easily in space, then you can live in just about any other environment that exists, unless the atmospheric pressure is too high, or it badly corrodes your hull materials. Any other situation is no more difficult to survive than a vacuum.

[/quote]A Proportions mine facility does not represent a continent-sized mine. If I were to add a continent-sized mine facility, well, it'd cost a lot more than my MegaComplexes do. The megacomplexes I do have represent less industry than a cultural center contains, and they produce up to 750 units/turn.[/quote]

I still think you are far overestimating the need for population to run such things. We only use our population for many things on Earth because it is so high and because unemployment is politically bad.

Now, it's true that a Proportions robo - miner component can produce up to 800 units/turn, but they also have maintenance costs, including the time to get to the destination, which almost require such a high rate or they won't produce a net gain at all.

A mineral base can be built in three turns that will produce 5000 minerals at an asteroid and cost about 500 maintenance a turn.

Anyway, thanks a lot for the discussion and feedback (both to you and everyone who's given feedback).

Remember that I'm just airing complaints that more relate to my view of colonization than actual problems within proportions. I think that it's one of the better mods out there, although it does push the limits of usability of the game interface with the massive amounts of base spaceyards that the homeworld can support.

It's good enough that I'm using the basic concept of slow development (with huge payoff at the end however) for a few of the races in my own crossover mod.