Proportions mod: So confusing!

[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.

[oleg]

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

Im sorry, but you missed PvK' point completely.

[Graeme Dice]

Originally posted by oleg:
"Oxford's contributions to technology in the Last decade have been miniscule when compared to all the contributions from every other research lab."

Im sorry, but you missed PvK' point completely.

Not really. His point was that creating a duplicate of Oxford would not double total research output. My rebuttal was that you wouldn't create a duplicate of Oxford, you'd take that much area and create a brand new research lab. When properly funded and directed it would not work on the problems that are mostly the same as those at existing labs, and would thereby increase research by an amount commesurate to its sizer and resource allotment.

[oleg]

There is a law of diminishingreturn: If you put twice as much money into R&D you will not double output. In developed society, making second lab with the same budget as Oxford will not create such a good University.

[Mylon]

The idea behind linear input/output relationship is that two labs can focus on two totally different subjects, yet their efforts will apply to the same project. For example, when researching gas colonizers, one lab can focus on the materials designed to make up the landing gear, another lab can design the landing gear and its mechanical properties, another lab can perform experimental tests given data from the first two labs, and this can likewise be reproduced with the many, many parts involved in the entire colonization. Thus, labs can add linearly, since they are not exactly focus on the exact same project. I agree that two labs working on the exact same project would not double the rate of production, but the idea is that there are many parts to each technology that can be split up so that each lab gets one part. Armor, for another example, can be involved with the labs that design the possible materials to be used, the many labs to test those materials against the many weapons or conditions it will have to face, then there's the lab(s) that concentrate on effective placement of armor on hulls to maximize effectiveness.

[PvK]

Yes, it is true that two labs can work on two different subjects, and one tech area may consist of multiple subjects, so some additive research, but only up to a point. Once again, the proportions presented are inaccurate, and this mod attempts to compensate.

The thing is, even one homeworld is NEVER going to "run out of space" for places for people to study all of the subjects they want to.

The limits on technological development are mostly a matter of culture, society, and education. Real estate has almost nothing to do with the rate of scientific progress.

PvK

[PvK]

Graeme, your message is sooo long...

Originally posted by Graeme Dice:

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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.

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Well, clearly, we disagree. I think it depends on the idiocy of the species, how much they become self-reliant on certain resources, and then mess them up. However, if they survive to spacefaring status, then I think they will be able to figure out how to maintain sustainable resources of all three types in their home environment. That being the case, I don't see anyone "using up" a whole planet. If they do, then they don't make it to functioning spacefaring status.

So, it seems to me that resource production will be more a matter of how much infrastructure can be developed in one place. Obviously, to me anyway, this place is going to be the homeworld. Resources aren't just base materials as will be found on alien planets. In order to build high-tech items, you don't just need minerals, organics, and rads - you need manufactured goods, the efficiency of producing which is highly determined by the network of resources and conditions found on a homeworld.

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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.

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Well again, we disagree. I think you're oversimplifying, and not considering many problems which will take serious amounts of time to develop. Developing technology, even in completely understood conditions on a home planet completely supported by infrastructure, takes time. And, it seems to me there would be millions of issues in trying to convert an alien planet into a homeworld-equivalent.

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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.

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Perhaps if you look at it as just a lab. However, that wasn't my point - you're looking at my question upside-down. What I was trying to say, is that a civilization only manages to raise so much novel thought and invention per year, mostly by the top fringe of its intellectual elite. An excellent educational system, and a gathering of minds to educate the best students in the best way, is a product of the culture as a whole, and is made possible, protected, and nurtured, by social factors built up over centuries, and which have essentially nothing to do with finding more space on alien planets to build labs.

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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.

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Well, clearly our assumptions vary widely. For example, I don't see "cornucopia fusion power from water" as a basic tech in SE4. If it were so easy to generate power, what are supplies and the Quantum Reactor all about in SE4? I think you are describing a much higher tech level in these things than SE4's tech tree represents. Of course, a mod that made such assumptions (and I think you are making many assumptions about the tech abilities besides just fusion power) would be perfectly legitimate - it's just not what I imagined when I thought about Proportions mod.

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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.

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Well, again, your imagination of SE4's tech levels is simply much higher than mine. For example, I don't see SE4 as starting with FTL drives. Light takes EIGHT MINUTES to get from the Sun to the Earth. An SE4 turn is about a month. So, light speed in SE4 would be oh, probably well over 1000, not 6 (ion engine speed in SE4).

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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.

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Again, I disagree. At least, at the tech levels I imagine. Each planet's environment is quite a bit different. Atmosphere composition is just one of many, many factors.

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(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.

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Just because you can make a chip to survive in an environment, after years of research, doesn't make it cost-effective, or not require separate research and development times thousands of different projects.

See the "we're imagining different tech levels", and "no, SE4 propulsion is not FTL" issues. To me, that would be true only after an appropriately long period of extension to the SE4 tech tree.

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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.

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Again, ok, you can redefine population as mostly non-organic droids, but that's just an abstraction. You still need something to be able to perform a massive range of tasks, including self-support and survival in an unexplored environment. You still need power, transportation, and tons of specialized equipment and materials. Using mostly robotic personnel may solve some problems, but it introduces others. You need less food and medicine, but more power, batteries, lubricants, maintenance facilities, and spare parts, etc. If you think this can all be made from chain-reaction factories and built up from rocks, well, I think you're describing year 3000 (or year 4000) technology again.

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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.

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Well, I disagree that it's a non-issue, at least without serious tech development. Atmospheric manipulation would be a tech area, as would fusion power, pollution and temperature control, etc.

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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.

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Well, a Honda factory on Earth already has the benefits of massive amounts of infrastructure for producing steel, alluminum, pLastics, spare parts, etc etc etc. You will have to either ship all such things to Venus, or build equivalent infrastructure, and the required environment for it to survive, on Venus, just to run the Honda plant. All of that is massively non-trivial, at least before year 3000-4000. Irradiated red-hot iron ore, assuming you can find it, is thousands or millions of steps away from being snapped together into a Honda. Meanwhile, Earth has an iron core, and is probably, it seems to me, far more convenient, in a thousand or more ways.

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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.

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Well, at year 3000, maybe.

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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.

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.

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If you have such technologies, maybe. Maybe by year 4000.

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.

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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.

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.

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Given your assumptions, I might say the same thing, but again, it sounds to me like you're 600-2000 years ahead of the techs I'm imagining.

Even so, though, I still think planetary conditions would be major economic disincentives. Atmosphere composition would be only one thing. Gravity, radiation, pressure, temperature, volcanic activity, meteor activity, weather activity, indigenous life, indigenous microbes, would all present seriously expensive obstacles.

The few planets that might actually be somewhat hospitable would be massively more valuable, because of the reduced expense of needing to develop specialized technology.

Moreover, given the size of a planet, I don't see any development effort actually "running out of space" within even a hundred years.

Due to the complementary nature, and the complexity, of high-tech infrastructure found on a fully-civilized planet, I don't see alien colonies quickly reaching homeworld-challenging abilities even at very high tech levels. Again, only possibly with massively advanced technology, and even then, it would take signifigant time.

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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.

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.

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Not utterly wrong. You're over-simplifying again, as does SE4. There are not just a handful of possible atmospheric compositions, or conditions. It wouldn't take a whole lot to make even the Earth's atmosphere unbreathable. Just add radiation, or a large meteor strike, or massive pollution, etc. Not to mention alien planets, where the planet's size and relation to its sun would generally be massively different, etc.

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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.

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It seems to me you're reasoning backwards, again. How many of the planets we know of have an Earthlike atmospheric composition? Zero. Starting from SE4's assumption that there are only a few atmosphere types for any planet, is just a fudge for gameplay purposes. Or, maybe a following of pulp fantasy trends. Anyway, I think there is massive room for interpretation in all of this. Star Trek would be one extreme "Sir, another Earth-like planet with humanoids on it...", and reality, perhaps, another. It seems to me SE4 is pretty close to Star Trek, and Proportions is somewhere between SE4 and the middle.

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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.

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Maybe not at your year 3000 tech level. At the tech level I imagine, robots would still require specialization and infrastructure development, which requires massive continuous transport of spare parts and supplies, as well as technological specialization, and infrastructure development on the planet to make the facilities feasible and productive.

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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.

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I don't see people "surviving easily" in a vacuum. They survive inside carefully and expensively produced and maintained artificial environments. Fragile environments which are only possible thanks to massive amounts of infrastructure which exists only on the homeworld. Planets generally are more inhospitible than vaccuum, especially before their environments have been explored and understood.

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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.

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.

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It's not just a question of "population to run such things". Infrastructure (energy, supplies, spare parts, transportation, etc) and hospitible environments, are also represented by population, and by cultural facilities. Your imagined technology seems to include the ability to make everything from refined metals to microchips to mechanical parts, to limitless power, all from a few simple machines. Mine doesn't.

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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.

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Well, you may have found a technique that I didn't think of, there. I'll have to check that for play balance... you may have found something I didn't intend.

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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.

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Sounds interesting!

PvK

[Fyron]

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

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Well, you may have found a technique that I didn't think of, there. I'll have to check that for play balance... you may have found something I didn't intend.

You want to see what space station mining bases can do? I can send you a nice savegame using FQM to make the map. (I don't recommend adding asteroid belts like those in FQM to Proportions, cause it is insane. Maybe a few asteroids per system instead of 1, but definitely not 25+ ). Remember, in one of the gold patches, asteroid values were increased from 50-150 to 150-300 (or so). They are much, much better at resource production than they used to be.

Also, colony ships are mostly pointless in Proportions. It is a lot less time consuming to send out a SYS and a few population transports, and building the colony ship right over the planet. This is especiallty true if the planet is a few systems (or more) away from the homeworld.

[oleg]

Originally posted by Imperator Fyron:
[Also, colony ships are mostly pointless in Proportions. It is a lot less time consuming to send out a SYS and a few population transports, and building the colony ship right over the planet. This is especiallty true if the planet is a few systems (or more) away from the homeworld.

Yes, if planet is more than 12 sectors away, it is faster to build medium transport with space yard (2 turns on homeworld, speed 4) and use it to build minimal colony ship on site (4 turns on emergency build) than colonise "normal" way. The save in resources is enormous, I think it is almost _3 times cheeper_. Pesonally, I look on this tactic as almost as cheeting and refrain to use it in solo plays. PvK, may be it would be better to remove "cargo" ability from space yard ?

Or give colony ship big maintanace reduction? Cost should stay the same - you still need to build it either way, the big loophole is enormous maintanance of colony ship that can be skipped by building it onsite.

[geoschmo]

Originally posted by PvK:
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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?
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Posted by Graeme:
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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.

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Posted by Imperator Fyron:
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Well, again, your imagination of SE4's tech levels is simply much higher than mine. For example, I don't see SE4 as starting with FTL drives. Light takes EIGHT MINUTES to get from the Sun to the Earth. An SE4 turn is about a month. So, light speed in SE4 would be oh, probably well over 1000, not 6 (ion engine speed in SE4).
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But Graeme's point is valid though if you throw out the FTL part. Ships in SE4 don't travel FTL speeds within system, but they go a LOT faster than anything we can currently do. The Voyager Probes were launched what, 30 years ago? And an SE4 ship launched from Earth now could catch them in about 2 months.

You guys's got me thinking about FTL in SE4 tersm though. I didn't want to hijack this thread so I started a new one.

Link to OT thread

Geoschmo