Colony ships, for sale cheap!

[Fyron]

A race that takes 150% construction rate and Hardy Industrialists spends 4500 racial points. They'd get their medium sized planet to have 4100 construction points. This would allow the proposed 8 turn colony ship (20800 minerals) to be built in 20800/4100 or 5.07 turns, which rounds up to 6 turns. This would represent a 25% increase in the rate of expansion. If you want to spend 4500 points on something, then you should get an advantage from it. And this option is really only viable in a 5000 point game, which, in my experience, is the exception, not the rule. If this is a big problem for you, then we could increase the cost per point beyond 20 of Construction from 100 to 200. That would make it really expensive to get this fast colonization.

[ 18 January 2002: Message edited by: Imperator Fyron ]

[dumbluck]

I like this idea. I had been toying with the idea of increasing the cost of the colony module myself, but I don't really have the time right now to do that. (PBW being down right now is actually a blessing for me. Busy, busy, busy!!!)

[Fyron]

quote:

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I was just trying to justify the current costs. I think the problem is more in the speed of building structures than in the speed of establishing colonies.
Example: You establish a colony on a huge world, and start building mines. [Edit: I mean mines as in mining facilities.] In only 30 years, you've covered the entire surface with mines. What??!! Holy Cow! that's a lot of mines!
Another example: In the same turn that you colonize, you can fill up the colony with settlers (from transports) to its max pop. What??!! Where did all that housing come from?
Sooooo, what you really need to do is to make all planets hold 6x as much stuff, decrease the capabilities of all facilities by 4x, get Aaron to add housing facilities to hold pop, and change the pop production bonuses to fit this new model. Then find some people who like to play excruciatingly long games!

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Alternatively, you could double or triple the build times of the basic facilities, thereby making it take 60 or 90 turns to fill up a huge planet.

[Suicide Junkie]

As another alternative, change the construction rate modifiers, so planets with 1M people build at 10% speed, with +1% for every 4M people or so.

I have a program to do that; just specify what settings you want.

[Quikngruvn]

I agree with IF about the racial points. Anyone wiling to spend that many points should get faster builds. Just wondering where you'd sacrifice, and what would happen when you meet other races who don't build as quick, but have nasty combat (and other) bonuses.

Upping facility costs and SJ's contruction-per-population idea are intriguing. I guess it's a matter of where to put the bottleneck: on expansion or on planetary development. Either would completely change the game. Both, and you'll be playing till SEVI comes out!

Quikngruvn

[Suicide Junkie]

Both are almost the same thing, except my method is a littlemore involved/fancy, and adds 5000 lines to settings.txt (I hope SE4 can handle that).

[PvK]

My Proportions mod (see Gold) addresses issues with population trasport, population growth, population effects on both production and construction (different curves) and colony development versus developed homeworlds. Of course, it does make it take years to build up colonies that can add much to the output of a homeworld, but the homeworld itself is enough to field a decent fleet. That is, I like realistically slow development, but probably a lot of players' reactions would be along the lines of "WTF! It takes forever to fully develop a planet!"



PvK