Some comments on Proportions Mod

[oleg]

I've played Proportions since SE IV Gold come out and enjoy it immensely. Most likely, it will be my most favorable SE IV mod for a time being and beyond till full Gold compatible Bab5 mod comes out. I praised Proportions several times on this forum (check my previous Posts if in doubt) but now I want to raise a critisism. IMHO, it is absolutely nessecary to double the population growth and half the population mass. Colonization modules can either keep its cargo capacity or have it reduced - it has not much effect on game dynamics, IMHO. When I made these changes, my games become much more lovely and less stagnant. Homeworld still keeps its utmost importance for whole game, but colony world development becomes much more important and interesting. There are many more interesting options in merchandise fleet design and composition. Example: small transport can carry one poupulation and has an incencitive to actually build few. Starliner is still important, since after cargo refinement it can hold extra population. I also tried further steps from Proportions to standard SE IV but found that much less fun then simple change I mentioned above.

I also increased research costs for metropolis and made cities require constraction+industry. I introduced two lower cultural facilities "town" and "outpost", cheaper but with reduced production/research output. Actually, it was previosly suggested here and I just tried to model those ideas myself. These changes made colonies development more interesting and "realistic" . It should also help AI to construct "developd world" providing research.txt and facilty_construction.txt files are optimized to make AI build cultural facilities with reasonable speed.


P.S. This post has been dictated by my wife who is an avid fan of proportions and does not necessary reflects my opinions.

[ 28 April 2002: Message edited by: oleg ]

[ 28 April 2002: Message edited by: oleg ]

[ 28 April 2002: Message edited by: oleg ]

[PvK]

If only it were possible to mod in extra options to the game setup screen, that would make changes to the values in "settings.txt," then there could of course be several such tweaks made easier for players. What I should probably do is document some options and include a few variants of Settings.txt for players to choose between.

I think you're probably right that it makes the development side move much more quickly, since you are doubling two exponential factors in planet development (pop size [therefore transport] and pop growth).

It comes down to preference - how painful do you want your realism? Realistically, a game where the goal is to take over and develop to a large extent a quadrant of a hundred or more star systems, modelled with one month turns and several equally strong hostile alien competitors, is going to take a ridiculous amount of time to complete. I think though that even in the standard SE4 game set, that's part of the appeal for a lot of players - that the game doesn't usually end for a possibly prohibitively long time. Realism and exciting, dynamic play are often at odds. Sticking with realism can lead to some pretty painfully slow development of colonies, though.

Anyway, I'm sure you're right that it will speed things up and probably be more dynamic if you double those two factors - sounds like a good option worth making a variant Settings.txt for. It could also be interesting to reduce the pop size but not increase the reproduction rate, because then although you could better develop several worlds, population preservation and allocation will be more important.

PvK

Edited for typos.

[ 28 April 2002: Message edited by: PvK ]

[ZeroAdunn]

Everyone says the colonies aren't important in proportions. I don't think this is true. In my most recent game I turned mega evil, and thus lost all of my treaties. When this happened I realised that I had a national defecit of 94,000 (with a storage of about 1,600,000) minerals. It was then that I realised that my colonies were painfully neglected. After pouring all of my research into mining and mothbolling nearly all of my ships in the mean time (I had a fleet of 40 high tech transports cruising the universe at the time) And just barely got my budget down to where I was only losing 5,000 minerals. Eventually Igot my facilities upgraded and managed to rebuild my funds, took both full upgrades till I finally was able to unmothball my fleet.

I had 13 battlestations at the time which I never mothballed and were the only thing keeping my enemies at bay.

[ 28 April 2002: Message edited by: ZeroAdunn ]

[PDF]

While we're at it, could I have some expert advice about HW/Col development in Proportions ? (As I already wrote, I love this mod and think "standard" SE4 should be like it )

1/ HW are full of Cult Centers right from the start, so is there stg to do to develop them until terraforming hi tech can add room for facilties ? I thought about scrapping SY or Resupply depot to make room for another CC or two but hesitates ...

2/ What's the "right path" to develop colonies ? They produce ridiculous amounts at start, I'm thinking putting Mineral Miners, some Research and then Cities, but this Last takes 6 yrs+ to produce !! I agree with Oleg that OutPosts and Towns/Small cities will be very welcome ...
Else I mostly use them for SY (in my HW system) or sat constrution, military facilities (training and other non-eco stuff..), but they don't really develop, even with liners importing pop regularly...
Is that pretty standard with Proportion mod ?

3/ Do AIs develop colonies or not ? I still have to run into one that does, so wonder ...

[PvK]

Ok. I'll add this to the documentation for the mod, too.

1) Homeworld development.

There are several possible options for homeworld development. Usually you have 2-3 slots for facilities that are not cultural centers (depending on whether you took Natural Merchants or not).

One of these is the Shipyard, which is important at least for the first year or two because it will be the fastest shipyard you have, so it's good for cranking out construction bases, colony ships, and, well, anything else you want to build in a hurry to get yourself set up. Once you have a mess of construction bases and/or are starting to have a budget close to your income, it may be worthwhile to actually scrap the homeworld shipyard in order to put something else there (at least for a while) in order to take advantage of the population and cultural bonuses of the homeworld - a facility on the homeworld is more productive than one on most colonies.

The other one or two facilities an empire will start with are a Space Port (Distribution Center) and a Resupply Depot, both of which are almost completely redundant, and give you choices for what you'd like to boost a bit. A quick option is just to add a couple of facilities (perhaps research) at first. In Version 2.1, a city will take less than two years on a homeworld (Metropolis about four), and may be worth it once you don't really need the fast homeworld construction queue for other projects. There will probably be some more options in 2.2. Building a training facility and scapping it some turns later can let you train your defense bases and ships hanging out at the homeworld.

More options appear after some research. Anything that improves the output of the entire planet will have a very strong effect. You can get a major increase to research, intel, or resource production this way. A good long-term option is a value improvement plant.

Once higher-tech shipyards are developed, it may be good to upgrade or rebuild the homeworld shipyard in order to build a more expensive facility quickly (like a city), or to replace major fleet losses quickly.


2) Colony development.

Increasing the population of colonies is vital to accelerate their development. The most effective way to do this is to build a fleet of population transports, and concentrate on a few specific colonies rather than trying to develop all of your colonies into developed worlds at once. Production climbs steeply with the first few population gains, up to about 5-8 million, at which point any production facilities built can be run at nearly full capacity. Construction rate increase is a much slower curve, that starts out fast but starts to slow at about 70 million (where it's only 48%) - the next 52% construction are gained on the way up to a 1 billion population, so more is better but somewhere in the 50-200 million range, it may be efficient to switch to building up another colony with your transports, instead. It sort of depends on what your goals are - you have to decide how many "big" colonies you want to concentrate on.

As far as what to build on colonies, I try to focus on themes, and start by getting what I need most urgently (like a space port or resupply depot - for many races, a space yard will also increase development rate, and so should often be built first). After urgent items, it makes sense to nearly fill up on the relatively cheap space-wasting facilities, and then start chewing on more expensive ones. Colonies that don't get a bunch of population, though, should probably be developed as outPosts - a good place to build a few useful facilities like a resupply depot, shipyard, store a bunch of units, etc.

A resupply depot on an outpost is much more important in Proportions than in the standard game because of the strong trade-offs in ship design between speed and range, so fast ships tend to be short ranged... unless their empire has a good network of resupply depots to bounce off of, in which case suddenly their fast defense ships can zoom around without being crippled by low range. The new supply effects in Gold 1.67 make this even more important. Suddenly, apparently silly little moons with a resupply depot and some defenses, can become major strategic assets, determining where the empire's fleet can be effectively deployed, or not.

Ship yard outPosts are similarly important for the usual reasons, but also more so because in Proportions, you can't "just fill up some more huge planets with resource facilities in a year or two" and suddenly be able to maintain a whole new fleet. The savings of a maintenance-free shipyard compared to a construction base are significant.

For defenses, at first, it's usually fastest and most efficient to build defenses at the homeworld or on construction bases, and then ship them to the colonies, so the colonies don't have to tie down their own queues (which they're generally really bad at, anyway). The main exception would be emergencies, and maybe having the colonies spend a turn or two on infantry, so they can't be easily snatched by aliens.


3) It can sometimes take the AI's a while to build colonies, but yes, they do. The 2.1 AI's seem to sometimes not really get started colonizing for a few years, but then get into it about year 5 or 6. An example game at year 9 has eight AI empires with 69 colonies between them (the Toltayans lead with 15). As of Proportions 1.5, they even build fairly reasonable things on them, establishing a resupply network so they can defend them reasonably, etc.


PvK

[PvK]

Yes, although colonies take a long time (and much resource investment) to build, and are of course quite weak compared to standard SE4 (while the homeworld is much stronger), they are still an effective way to eventually build up an advantage over other empires in resources, research, and intelligence.

Colonies' resupply, shipyard, and resource storage abilities can also be very useful. ZeroAdunn experienced how resource storage can be very important, and can Last a long time in Proportions if you let it build up. A storage facility can store 10 to 20 years of production from a facility (or one to two years' net mineral output of a cultural center), so it may be worthwhile to build up some stockpiling capacity and fill it with surplus during times of peace, so as to be able to sustain a larger fleet during times of war. Holding a large part of the fleet in mothball reserve during peacetime may be worthwhile, as well.

PvK

quote:

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Originally posted by ZeroAdunn:
Everyone says the colonies aren't important in proportions. I don't think this is true. In my most recent game I turned mega evil, and thus lost all of my treaties. When this happened I realised that I had a national defecit of 94,000 (with a storage of about 1,600,000) minerals. It was then that I realised that my colonies were painfully neglected. After pouring all of my research into mining and mothbolling nearly all of my ships in the mean time (I had a fleet of 40 high tech transports cruising the universe at the time) And just barely got my budget down to where I was only losing 5,000 minerals. Eventually Igot my facilities upgraded and managed to rebuild my funds, took both full upgrades till I finally was able to unmothball my fleet.

I had 13 battlestations at the time which I never mothballed and were the only thing keeping my enemies at bay.

[ 28 April 2002: Message edited by: ZeroAdunn ]

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[oleg]

Actually, the major reason I want to double population growth and reduce pop. mass is to reduce the late game micromanagement. In standard Proportions I had to shuffle population to my first colony during whole game. Population transports made up 90% of my navy. After making these changes I actually managed to fill first colonies (after many and many turns, but still) and redirect transports to newer colonies.

As to homeworld development, I push very hard to research computers. Once I have robotoid factory II and central computer center II, I scrap resuply depot and spaceport and build these facilities. Later on I also build system-wide facilities in the home system ASAP. I also like to play religues because of nature shrine. 1-3% per year improve in home world values goes long way to fortify your economy ! I also tried to build value improvement plants on homeworld, but since you have only two available slots still keeps nature shrine very important.

[ 29 April 2002: Message edited by: oleg ]

[Loser]

Do Value Improvement Plants (which affect only that planet (maybe sector?)) stack with system-wide Nature Shrine?

dang, that'd be cool....

[PDF]

quote:

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Originally posted by oleg:
[QB]Actually, the major reason I want to double population growth and reduce pop. mass is to reduce the late game micromanagement. In standard Proportions I had to shuffle population to my first colony during whole game. Population transports made up 90% of my navy. After making these changes I actually managed to fill first colonies (after many and many turns, but still) and redirect transports to newer colonies.

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Actually I've found Pop transports fleet do not create micromanagement : build 4-5 ships, group them, give them "move to HW/Load/Move to col/Unload" repeating orders and dang, you've just established a passenger line ...
Ok, it's more difficult when you come at war ...

[mottlee]

Yup need LOT'S O Transports great mod tho I am running it now started out with all tech (AI too) takes time to build up but I kickin butt and taking names