Proportions Question

[tbontob]

What is the upgrade list to get to a cultural center?

Is it Settlement==>Colonial Community==>Minor City==>Major City==>Metropolis==>Cultural Centre?

I read somewhere that the SpacePort City is not uprgadeable to a Cultural Centre. What is it's upgrade list?

[PvK]

You can't upgrade a population center into a Cultural Center. The Cultural Center has to be developed from scratch.

You can't even upgrade to an Arcology, because those too require advanced planning and construction from scratch.

The largest upgradeable population center facility is a Megalopolis, which IIRC can be upgraded from Minor City or larger.

PvK

[oleg]

It may seems like a major letdown that you have to build advanced cultural buildings from scratch, but that is the only way to reconcile PvK' vision of Future and SE reality.

I feel you pain though, man. Every time I get past 300 turns.

[tbontob]

Yeh!

Only I am in the beginning of the game NGC Proportions (2405.4) and am still wondering how everything relates to each other.

But it does seem a little wierd that you cannot upgrade to a cultural centre. I suppose the SE4 game structure prevents it in some way.

[dogscoff]

But it does seem a little wierd that you cannot upgrade to a cultural centre. I suppose the SE4 game structure prevents it in some way.

Yeah- because cultural centre tech is available from the start of the game (it has to be, because that's what your homeworld starts with), it would break the city upgrade system if it were on the upgrade tree.

The game only upgrades to the highest thing on the tree, so if you build a minor city and have city/major city tech availabel, you would ONLY be able to upgrade it to to a major city- you CANNOT upgrade to the intermediate size (city). That's why the colonial development techs are so cheap - they are only there to allow you some control over your upgrades (ie don't research major city until you have issued all your "upgrade to city" orders)

Likewise, if cutlural centres were at the top of that tree, you'd ONLY be able to upgrade to them, you'd never have the option to upgrade to to a city or major city or any other intermediate stage. Because CCs are so horrendously expensive, this would that whole upgrade path utterly unusable.

Of course the (seemingly) obvious solution is to make CCs affordable, but that's just not how proportions is supposed to be. There are a few long-winded and occasionally heated threads around here as to why they should be priced as they are.

[Ed Kolis]

What if there were duplicates of each facility which had its own upgrade path that stopped at whatever level you wanted? This would also solve the problem of multiple facilities upgrading to Cultural Center, as there would be duplicates of that as well.

(I can't remember the Proportions names so I'll use the SE2 names )

Outpost A (non-upgradeable)
Outpost B -> Colony B
Outpost C -> Colony C -> Settlement C
Outpost D -> Colony D -> Settlement D -> Cultural Center D
Spaceport Outpost A (non-upgradeable)
Spaceport Outpost B -> Spaceport Colony B
Spaceport Outpost C -> SpaceportColony C -> Spaceport Settlement C
Spaceport Outpost D -> Spaceport Colony D -> Spaceport Settlement D -> Spaceport Cultural Center D

Of course, the upgradeability of any facility would be determined at build time, but at least it would work better than the standard system... And it would have the added advantage of keeping all the levels of facilities on the screen without turning off "latest only"!

[PvK]

That would work, Ed. It'd be a bit of a cut & paste party. Maybe add an "Urban Planning" tech area with low cost, so that it's an optional complication in case not everyone wants to do it.

Note though that I would then double the cost of the Cultural Center which could be upgraded to, because upgrades are always half-price. Arcology would remain something that needs to be build from scratch, because of what it is.

PvK

[tbontob]

Hmmm.....

I am not sure if I get it.

The statement has been made that you cannot have upgradeable city facilities which culminate into a cultural centre because we must start with cultural centres.

If the above is true, then using another example, if the HW starts with Ship Yard 3, then we would not be able to upgrade to Ship Yard 3 from Ship Yard 1 or Ship Yard 2.

Even if the above is true, we could had a upgradeable city facility to a Kultural Centre (spelling intended) where the Kultural Centre is identical to a Culural Centre.

[Fyron]

Once you have SY 3 available, you can not upgrade from SY 1 to SY 2. You can onlu upgrade to SY 3. This is the problem. If Cultural Centers were upgradeable from cities and such, you could not do any upgrading at all, because the CC costs so much, and eliminates the earlier city type facilities on the upgrade path.

Even if the above is true, we could had a upgradeable city facility to a Kultural Centre (spelling intended) where the Kultural Centre is identical to a Culural Centre.

This only works if the Kultural Center is not available from the beginning. Proportions does have the Colony Cultural Centers (not sure if they are obseleted in the latest Version or not), which implies that PvK originally intended for some upgrade path to them, but took that out.

[ July 17, 2003, 01:49: Message edited by: Imperator Fyron ]

[PvK]

Right.

So, the suggestion would be to make numerous variations on the facilities in order to allow more types of upgrades, as long as you pre-planned them and could figure out the new upgrade system. Apparently some players think this would be worth the effort, because they really would like to be able to upgrade amongst the many different sizes of cities and so on with more freedom than is currently possible. In theory this could be done, though in practice it would be a fair amount of work, both to implement and to figure out and use in play.

The Colony Cultural Centers were to allow insane manic players to try to build one or more cultural centers on a homeworld or colony where there was already a space yard. This was back in an earlier Version of the mod when homeworld cultural centers had stacking spaceyard abilities, but the hard-coded limits thus prevented them from being built on a planet which already had a spaceyard. Therefore I added the colony cultural center. Later I decided to remove the SY ability of homeworld centers, so the Colony CC just became an atmospheric variation. I think it's still in the mod, but now requires research in colonial development in order to be able to embark on the massively long-term project of actually building one.

PvK