Proportions....

[PvK]

Well, the unmodded game allows you to replicate a whole homeworld in a year or two, so if you want to play that kind of SF, it's quite easy.

Proportions is about dealing with problems, not hand-waving them with "tech I don't even have to research or build will evaporate the problem". All the things you describe would require major research, and then, if SE4 would let me mod it in, actually constructing the technology. The problem is, SE4 doesn't give me many options for how to include cryogenic storage, that would be any different from the high-tech starliner modules I already have. As for growing clones from CD's and goo, well, I could give organic manipulation's replicant facilities to everyone, though I would say it would be a very high tech, and would also require tech that could raise and educate these people, and probably some population control facilities to control the anger that you want to replace them with clones and robots.

PvK

[Graeme Dice]

The technology level that PvK has assumed the races to have at the beginning of a Proportions game is one that is pretty much where we will be in 50 years, with the caveat that FTL travel is possible in his universe. This is why the mod almost completely lacks high-tech solutions to most problems.

[Krsqk]

"Well, if I were designing the game system, [race size] might be something you could specify during race design."

This would actually be really cool! Spend points to decrease your race's size, which could decrease the number (or more likely, size) of B/LS/CQ comps for your ship. Would also affect the space needed for population. Not a bad idea for SE5.

[Phoenix-D]

Can be sort of done right now, with racial traits. Simply make a racial area that gives the reduced-size components (with the same family as the regular ones) and nothing else. Space can't be affected except by Advanced Storage techniques and the like, so you'd need two traits.

It'd be really difficult to make a "larger" race like that though..

Phoenix-D

[PvK]

Hmm, yeah, you could only really do it with a facilities trait (or, a whole range of them - in SE3, wasn't "Advanced Storage Techniques" called "Tiny Race"?), and a mount or racial tech tree that would allow some component size changes.

PvK

[Sinapus]

Pvk: Did you ever experiment with using the "default population" size for colonies in the settings.txt file? (Don't have the game in front of me, but I think you can set a population for when a ship colonizes a planet.)
I've been experimenting with incorporating proportions-like settings into my own personal mod, though in a way that the AI can use w/o massive alterations. (Like creating "city" type Versions of various resource-producing facilities and making them available at higher levels of extraction so it becomes worth researching those techs past level 3.)

Basically, I've had troubles giving the colony modules higher cargo capacities than the standard cargo modules. Currently, 1M pop is set at 50kT, w/the cargo modules having multiples of that number in capacity. Would rather it be 500kT (did I mention I'm calling this Proportions-Lite? ) with growth every 5 turns. Just about ready to set colony module capacity to 0, set that settings.txt flag to 1M (unrealistic, I know) and making the cargo bay capacities divisible into 500.

[PvK]

Well, the automatic colony population setting in settings.txt does work. I just don't use it because it creates population from nothing, and I'm trying to make population a valuable resource which is difficult to build up.

I'm confused though why you'd have problems increasing the capacity of colony modules. As you can see in Proportions, it works fine.

PvK