Proportions mod: So confusing!

[PvK]

Originally posted by Graeme Dice:

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In standard SE4 the advanced civilization is represented by the facilities, after all,

I disagree. I'd say the standard game treats the Player/Empire as the civilization. It looks to me like the facilties are just facilities.

it's not going to take more than 10 million or so people in a single city to exploit most of the planet.

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.

In Proportions, yes you can do this, and it can make a lot of sense from a miltary/industrial point of view - move a bunch of population (representing mainly construction equipment and droids, if you like) to a colony, build a construction yard to represent setting up local construction infrastructure, and then fill it up with simple facilities, and leave 10 million or so population there. That's an efficient technique in Proportions.

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.

A real civilization is not going to "run out of room" at home, and "just need some land to build more factories", or at least, not to the extent abstractly represented by SE4.

I would think that all civilizations would do so at some point when their population grows beyond a standard point.

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I'm not questioning whether it happens 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? 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? 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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Technology is definitely not immune to environmental conditions. Try moving a Honda factory to Venus, and see how well it operates. Could one develop technology to do so? Yes, but it would require time, and experimentation with prototypes in that particular environment.

All that it would take to operate a Honda plant on Venus is a pressure dome. Venus has nearly the same gravity as Earth, so the machinery can be identical.

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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. (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.) 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. 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? 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. 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.

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A planet consists of many different environments, and it takes years of study to understand them, let alone to develop technologies that function well in them. All of that takes time, intelligent research, and a lot of expense, especially if the planet is years away from your civilization even in the fastest ships your empire can produce.

At the start of the game, a ship can cross a solar system in two months. In the 1500's, a sailing ship could cross the Atlantic in two months. Futuristic explorers aren't going to be slower than ancient imperialists.

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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.

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I can't think of any facility in Proportions, except for cultural facilities, which would cover half a continent.

Let's say Earth is the model for a medium sized planet, with about 20 facilities on the available land. That's equivalent to a single facility using just slightly less land than all of the U.S.

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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.

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That's completely untrue. Try going to any of the planets in Earth's solar system. Try to find anything to eat. Try to find any consumer goods. Try to find breathable air.

There are plenty of planets in SE4 that have breathable atmospheres.

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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. 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?

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Try to find building materials. Try to find technological components. Try to find medicine. Ok, so maybe there's plenty of rock and unrefined iron. If you're lucky, you might be able to develop a process for gathering and processing some frozen indigenous water. How many million people were you planning on moving to this planet?

I was thinking about 10,000 to start, and give them about a decade or two to get the planet to the infrastructure to the point where it's not much more of a problem than building more houses.

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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. 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.

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What does it take to keep them alive and willing to be there? You expect them to breed and raise children educated there? You don't want them to form their own independant government? Also, for everything they need, how much does it cost to build, maintain and operate the fleet of transport equipment required to get all that stuff there?

How is a colony on a distant alien world going to increase production by an order of magnitude overnight? It seems to me it will mainly involve massive technological and logistical problems, which will at _least_ take a few decades to get up to speed. In Proportions, after just one decade, colonies can provide a major increase in production and other abilities. That seems pretty optimistic to me.

It seems very pessimistic to me. Remember that a single robo-miner has better mineral extraction performance than a mineral mine that covers the continental U.S.

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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. 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. They also decrease the subject's value steadily. I didn't see much way around the hard-coded limits imposed on robo-miners by SE4, but didn't want to throw them out, since they can be interesting to use (especially since they tend to cause political tension between human players). From a technical perspective, though, robo-miners either collect from asteroids. So it seems reasonable that asteroid mining could be massively easier and more efficient (in the short-term, anyway) than descending into an alien planet's atmosphere and trying to build a permanent facility that can sustain itself efficiently on the surface, and then the materials have to be lifted out of the planet's gravity. As for remote-mining an uncolonized planet... that seems like it would be a different problem altogether, but I'm not aware at the moment of a way to modify the way it works in SE4. I think there might be a game option when you set up a game, either in the program or in settings.txt, so that you can't actually remote-mine planets, or the rate is adjusted. I might just be making that up, though.

Anyway, thanks a lot for the discussion and feedback (both to you and everyone who's given feedback).

PvK

[ September 25, 2002, 11:55: Message edited by: PvK ]