[DirectorTsaarx]

Originally posted by geoschmo:
Now Director. Don't make me bring the smack down on you, ok? Just let it slide. Everyone is entitled to a mispeak now and then.

Sorry - I really was trying to defend his good name; at least this community tries to police itself...

Anyway - everyone return to the topic at hand:

IMHO, Proportions does a very good job of slowing the game down and changing the emphasis from fast expansion and quick aggression. Beyond that, it has some neat ideas for technology, has led to us players learning new things about how certain facility abilities interact, and provided a new way to play a favorite game. Whether it's "realistic" (or, at least, more "realistic" than the unmodded game) is certainly open to debate.

To draw on an example from science fiction, the colonies in Larry Niven's "Known Space" series will certainly not compete with Earth as far as resource production (or research, or intelligence). They suffer from exactly the problems PvK points out, i.e. inhospitable conditions over most of the colony planet, but without the major technological advances postulated by Graeme and others (cheap power, cheap intelligent robotic work force, etc.).

On the other hand, that same series postulates a thriving "colony" of sorts in the asteroid belt that competes quite well with Earth, nearly surpassing it on occasion (IIRC). Maybe it was because of proximity to the homeworld; the Civilization series of games certainly models that aspect of an empire by imposing a production penalty on cities based on distance from the capitol (modified by infrastructure - roads, railroads, etc.). Now, as someone mentioned previously on this thread, SE4 doesn't provide that sort of modeling, probably because trade routes are not really modeled (there's some handwaving in the manual, and I'm not certain I want the added micromanagement of establishing trade routes in SE4; but then sometimes I would like that feature, so I could focus on something besides blowing up my neighbor's ships and committing genocide ).

Anyway, it's certainly been an interesting debate; postulating future technology and when it will be available is a favorite game among engineers.

One final point - I have to agree with PvK about research centers not necessarily being linearly additive. Research institutions (at least the ones I've worked for) are notorious for competing with other labs (or even with other scientists in the same lab), thus reducing the additive effect (and negating some of the "parallel processing" benefits). There's some benefit in that each lab will work harder to get the result first, but I wouldn't say that two labs competing with each other will get a job done twice as fast. What's the old saying, "9 women can't have a baby in a month"? Now, research isn't exactly the same thing, but forcing 9 labs to work on a small piece of some large project isn't necessarily going to result in completion of that large project 9 times faster than if a single lab was working on it. In that case, there are two limiting factors:

• Length of time required to complete the slowest/hardest/most complex piece of research
• Coordination between the labs to ensure that each lab's result will interoperate with the other labs

That first point comes up in discussions of parallel processing on computers; no operation can be performed faster than the slowest task (or, more completely, than the longest chain of serial tasks, since some tasks depend on results from other tasks). The second point has bitten me in the... neck... repeatedly. Two separate Groups come up with elegant solutions to their respective pieces of a problem, and the solutions are completely incompatible. Now, if we assume absolute dictatorial management, that second point becomes less of a problem; but, in SE4 terms, unless your race description includes something like "fanatical devotion to the leader", I'd be hard-pressed to guarantee that the scientists will pay much attention to said dictator.
Anyway, that's my two cents on the current discussion. Feel free to disagree...