[PvK]

I guess I look at the choices offered by Proportions colony development as adding some actual management, or macro-management, rather than micro-management. It's still a perfectly valid and effective strategy to make dull pre-planned colonies planned years or decades in advance (just fill up on minor facilities - you'll only usually have a handful of planets in a position to build any cities, anyway, and the decisions to do so are years apart).

I agree that the upgrade mechanic is an unfortunate artificial limitation. I just offer some uses for what upgrade options the game allows. When I select the values for the various larger facilities, I look at a number of factors including the time before return on investment, and the ability to upgrade. If you really use all of the slots on a planet with major facilities, then there becomes a choice, if you want to do even more major development there, between a long multiple-facility upgrade, with no loss in production during the upgrade, but a longer period of waiting for any improvement; or scrap and replace, which may seem wasteful, and may not be as efficient as building a city on another planet, but give faster return-on-investment than upgrading 3 or more large facilities at once (and also will give a major immediate boost for the scrap value of the facility).

It is an interesting suggestion to use more facility slots. It would mean re-working ALL of the production facility values, however, which would be a lot of work.

Also, as I described a lot during the "Proportion Mod - so confusing!" thread, I am using the low number of slots on domed colonies to abstractly represent the extreme difficulty of trying to turn a wildly inhospitible environment into a productive and efficient world comparable to the homeworld. If domed colonies offered bunches of facility slots, it would be years and years before you'd notice any inconvenience from developing on the worst worlds, which IMO would be much less desirable (from a design standpoint). That is, I _like_ that there are serious limits, inconvenience and inefficiency, and therefore choices, about what you can put on a domed colony.

PvK