Proportions mod: So confusing!

[Mylon]

Keep in mind that 500 turn figure was a for a rance with a 45% bonus to space yard construction. Even if it was 50 turns for a hardy industrialist, how many would you expect to see? They'd still cost 240kT of materials (!) and drain a significant amount of resources from the empire. At 50 turns each, seeing homeworld clones wouldn't be very likely, since it would still take 900 turns to build as many cultural centers. 90 years may seem a too little to reproduce what Earth has done, but consider this for playability. Earth has had 100 year long wars, maybe some longer ones, but a vanilla game can easily be resolved in 50 years or less. Isn't that a little fast for a war of galatic scale?

Heck, now that I think about it, even 50 turns seems a little long.

[ September 24, 2002, 15:58: Message edited by: Mylon ]

[PvK]

Originally posted by Mylon:

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Originally posted by PvK:
500 turns or 500 years? I have an H.I. race in a current game, and on a planet with 7 million colonists and NO space yard, it will build a CC in 400 years. On one with 60 million people and NO space yard, 260 years. On one with 30 million and a level I space yard, 184.7 years. If you've got a colony that can build a cultural center in only 500 turns (50 years), then maybe I should increase the time required.

Because, as I've said recently on this thread before, a cultural center represents a whole civilization, and mass-producing McDonalds and Wall Mart (and strip mines and industry) doesn't count. All that does is add industry (and blandness) to an existing civilization.

No civilization can be created in 50 years. Cities and industry, maybe. Civilizations, no.

50 years or 500 turns. Guess what? That was my homeworld that was telling me this. Personally, I think you may be focusing a little too much on making it realistic. A ringworld can be constructed in about 25 turns in vanilla SEIV and can easily take about 200 turns or to fill with just facilities, not including cargo or whatnot. 50 turns seems reasonable for a well developed alien world to build something on the order of a cultural center, while 500 turns seems awfully long for even a homeworld.

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IF you're just talking about building a bunch of shopping malls, condominiums, infrastructure, factories, and labs on a continental scale, fine, sure; and IF it's on a planet as hospitable as a homeworld, which happens to have a spare continent which is habitable but for some reason has nothing on it; THEN ok, sure, if you have massive amounts of construction equipment and building materials and so on available, and you're people are talented at building, maybe possibly 5 years might be possible, I guess. I think 50 is more like it.

However, that's not what's happening in the game situation. On a homeworld, the nice habitable continents are FULL. Ok, so you can try to build a new living area in the polar regions, or underwater, or something. Look how flourishing the Earth colonies in Alaska and Siberia are... And, it's probably going to be vastly easier to do THAT than to build things and inhabit an alien world far from the homeworld. If you're replacing a destroyed cultural center on the homeworld, the expense and time represent the massive cost and effort of dealing with hundreds of millions of casualties, irradiated land, and so on. Again, it's not like you have a nice flat grass field and 10 billion tons of construction materials, and 100 million bulldozers on hand.

Even so, that's only talking about building the physical part of a cultural center.

What are you imagining a cultural center is? I get the feeling you and Graeme aren't considering or accepting that there is more to a culture than a physical carbon copy.

If you just want the production and research equivalent of a cultural center, you CAN accomplish this in a much shorter period of time. A CC gives 2900 production, 1000 research, and 300 intel. With 15 resource facilities, 10 research facilities, and 2 intel facilities, you can get 200 greater output than that. With a good colonial population and construction yard, these can each be built in one turn, with a total time required of 27 turns = 2.7 years. This is just at tech level I, too. So, YES, it IS possible even in the existing game, to just mass produce facilities and get the equivalent of another cultural center's production, in under 3 years (not counting the shipyard itself, or the time to get the population there, whatever proportion of biological or mechanical labor this represents for your particular empire).

Of course, you'll need a Huge colony world of your atmosphere to get that all on one colony world, but that's how I represent the effects of the planet being completely incompatible with your base race's natural environment, and the massive catalog of other details that would be involved in trying to turn an alien planet into a carbon copy of one's home planet. By upgrading and replacing the basic facilities with complexes, megacomplexes, cultural faciltiies, etc, this represents accomplishing the necessary work of making the transition, and developing things besides just factories and labs.

PvK

[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.

[quote]

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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 ]

[PvK]

Originally posted by Mylon:
Keep in mind that 500 turn figure was a for a rance with a 45% bonus to space yard construction. Even if it was 50 turns for a hardy industrialist, how many would you expect to see? They'd still cost 240kT of materials (!) and drain a significant amount of resources from the empire. At 50 turns each, seeing homeworld clones wouldn't be very likely, since it would still take 900 turns to build as many cultural centers. 90 years may seem a too little to reproduce what Earth has done, but consider this for playability. Earth has had 100 year long wars, maybe some longer ones, but a vanilla game can easily be resolved in 50 years or less. Isn't that a little fast for a war of galatic scale?

Heck, now that I think about it, even 50 turns seems a little long.

Well, these are mostly "playability" concerns. Ya, it can be more exciting to play a faster game. There's a lot of distance between Proportions' pacing (quite slow, but still generous compared to my sense of what would be realistic) and that of the standard set (very fast-paced, so it's actually possible to conquer and terraform hundreds of solar systems, and master all sciences, in a matter of decades). I was actually surprised that so many players liked Proportions' pacing so well. I'd expect most players to prefer something between the two, and many do, and of course people are free to mod and adjust my mod to suit their tastes, and the game settings and settings.txt can easily be used to make major adjustments.

As for some of your specific points:

* SE4 isn't galactic in scale. Even if you use a 255-system quadrant, which is a HUGE game from a gameplay perspective, 255 systems isn't very much of a galaxy. Drive out away from city lights on a clear night and check out the sky. One estimate of the number of stars in our own galaxy is 100 BILLION (100,000,000,000). This would probably take very many SE4 turns to colonize.

* SE4 is a game with roughly month-long turns, individual spaceships (and satellites, and fighters) which resolves combat down to the single weapon shot, and so on. It can take an hour or more to play each turn later in the game. The game generally starts with players having a homeworld and zero units. It's not really reasonable and realistic, if you take the time-scale literally, to expect to be able to conquer and colonize to the extent that the unmodded game set allows, in any playable amount of time. The unmodded game does allow players to fully develop and conquer a large quadrant in a matter of decades. Proportions doesn't. That's "by design." You can still have very interesting expansion and conflict in Proportions, and you could conquer and dominate all of the other players. You probably won't ever build a cutural center, but you're not supposed to. Cultural centers represent more than just the industry and physical structure of a civilization. You CAN multiply your production and research capacity through colonization, eventually. However, even that isn't necessarily required to dominate a quadrant.

* Since the time frame of a game of SE4 is limited to a few decades of game time (unless you say the turns are actually a year long, or something), what you can expect in Proportions is to be able to establish a few pretty large colonies and a fairly large number of outPosts, but to have to decide how much effort to devote to developing those, and how much to develop a military force. There can still be large-scale conflicts, and there generally are. But there is much less necessity to do lightning colonization and expand or become quickly insignifigant.

Some of the design goals of Proportions include:

To allow the game to continue with interesting goals and technologies to discover, even after many decades of play. Most technologies should usually not be researched to their highest levels, and most colonies should still have room to improve (and remain inferior to a homeworld) even after many decades.

Late in the game, the remaining undamaged homeworlds should still be the most powerful planets, but there should be some very valuable and formidable colonies. However, most planets should still be either uncolonized, or relatively undeveloped, compared to the highly populated and developed colonies. That is, if a colony is started but no particular effort is made to develop it (mainly by shipping a bunch of population there), it shouldn't have developed into a major colony just because some years have passed without any particular effort to build it up - i.e., it takes deliberate effort (population transport) to create a major colony.

PvK

[Mylon]

Why don't you just say cultural world centers aren't meant to be built at all and leave it at that? Sure, a homeworld that leaves all of its building to base space yards could maybe start turning a space port/resupply depot into a cultural world center from the second turn and it might actually see it done before the end game, but even then it would be pretty impracitcal as would take a huge number turns _after_ being built to make up for their huge cost through mineral production, research points, intel points, ect...

Even on ringworlds were conditions are always optimal and one really can drive a unmodified Honda (well, you'll still need paved roads) around, accomplishing such a task is nearly impossible.

Thinking in purely game mechanics (which, in my opinion have more say that realism, because if I wanted realism I'd play more real life), Cultural world centers are wasteful to build. Starting off with a bunch is a nice bonus, but to build one would lock a good planet's production for 500 turns and require an insane amount of resources, thus making them unpractical.

And, from another standpoint, consider that America was a colony some 300 years ago or so. People brought their culture with them and built rather quickly, about as much as population would allow. The two factors that limited America's growth were population and technology. Look how fast things grew when the railroads were built. Colonists don't loose their culture merely because they no longer are around their own culture, so if you bring along enough colonists then culture by itself is certain not a problem. The infrastructure (on the level of compactness as the colony world center) would be difficult, but you even noted how it can be done in 27 turns.

[PvK]

Originally posted by Mylon:
Why don't you just say cultural world centers aren't meant to be built at all and leave it at that?

Good question. If I didn't mention that yet, I don't remember why. I've said it on several other threads in the past.

Sure, a homeworld that leaves all of its building to base space yards could maybe start turning a space port/resupply depot into a cultural world center from the second turn and it might actually see it done before the end game, but even then it would be pretty impracitcal as would take a huge number turns _after_ being built to make up for their huge cost through mineral production, research points, intel points, ect...

Yep. I guess I figured people would realize this as soon as they saw their homeworld reporting 100 years to build one, and colonies reporting "Never" to build one.

Even on ringworlds were conditions are always optimal and one really can drive a unmodified Honda (well, you'll still need paved roads) around, accomplishing such a task is nearly impossible.

Within a few decades, yes, as intended.

Thinking in purely game mechanics (which, in my opinion have more say that realism, because if I wanted realism I'd play more real life), Cultural world centers are wasteful to build. Starting off with a bunch is a nice bonus, but to build one would lock a good planet's production for 500 turns and require an insane amount of resources, thus making them unpractical.

Yes, quite so. Creating a new culture is not a practical path for the relatively short period of conflict and exploration represented by an SE4 game.

And, from another standpoint, consider that America was a colony some 300 years ago or so. People brought their culture with them and built rather quickly, about as much as population would allow. The two factors that limited America's growth were population and technology. Look how fast things grew when the railroads were built. Colonists don't loose their culture merely because they no longer are around their own culture, so if you bring along enough colonists then culture by itself is certain not a problem. The infrastructure (on the level of compactness as the colony world center) would be difficult, but you even noted how it can be done in 27 turns.

Sure, but again, what culture did they bring? European culture. They effectively destroyed the existing culture of the existing population, brought their own European culture, and developed it a bit, and built lots of housing and infrastructure, over the span of 300 years and with hundreds of millions of people and untold millions of tons of machinery and materials. They consumed many times their own mass in organic materials, massive amounts of energy and mineral resources, etc. The conditions were ideal.

I'm not sure I've clearly explained the difference between culture and industry. I don't think it can be directly modelled in SE4, but Proportions is my best shot at an abstraction of it within the limits of that game system.

I do allow building industry at a very generous rate (you can build the productive capacity of a cultural center on a colony world in well under 5 years, given enough population and facility slots). The reason I have this take up much more space is to represent the difficulty of building net-efficient infrastructure on inhospitable alien worlds. Cultural Centers offer much more concentrated (on a fac slot basis) production largely because of the native conditions, but also because of cultural, logistical, and infrastructure considerations.

In addition to all of that, however, cultural centers represent many necessary elements that are not physical and can't be physically mass-produced and duplicated for a multiplicative effect, the way the game program would do if I made the build costs less. As I've mentioned below at least twice, reasearch facilities really should not add their points together, and should not be shiftable every turn to concentrate on whatever project the Emperor wants. Also, the ability to get billions of intelligent and educated people to work towards a common goal requires an outstanding culture with very impressive social structures, government, religion, system of raising and educating children, economic systems, and all of the other human activities that make these things worthwhile and possible in the first place: arts, music, literature, philosophy, romance, entertainment, communities, toys, crafts, sports, fashion, cuisine, tradition, lore, and many others. It can't be duplicated by droids overnight. You may be able to duplicate the same stuff (see Wall-Mart, McDonalds, Safeway, pop music, Twinkies, pulp fiction, Hollywood spin-offs, "Next Generation" TV shows, etc...), but that's mostly just repeating existing cultural works. "You already have a similar quadrant-wide ability."

PvK

[jimbob]

(see Wall-Mart, McDonalds, Safeway, pop music, Twinkies, pulp fiction, Hollywood spin-offs, "Next Generation" TV shows, etc...), but that's mostly just repeating existing cultural works.

Heretic! Wal-Mart IS culture.
Repent or we will grind you up and make you into McNuggets.

[Mylon]

Yes, it may have taken America 300 years to get where we have today, but also consider:

1) It isn't a set thing. You can't say 300 years alter America has finally achieved "cultural center" status. Whos to say they didn't achieve it with the invent of the automobile? Or the railroads?
2) Production is skewed by the fact that only one thing can be produced at a time. Such infrastructure as a city doesn't spring up overnight, but it also isn't the only focus of the people.
3) Cost is also skewed because colonies are self sustaining in nature. True, America has maybe consumed its own weight in organics, but sustaining the colonists is free in SEIV because they produce enough naturally to take care of themselves. It is production facilities or other things that cost extra.
4) They're also evolving things. It would be reasonable that if a new mining technique is discovered you shouldn't have to build half of the cultural center over again just to refine one part. The 50% cost factor may be unavoidable, but the tremendus cost of that very 50% assures that it will never happen (assuming multiple levels of cultural facilities).

[dogscoff]

1) It isn't a set thing. You can't say 300 years alter America has finally achieved "cultural center" status. Whos to say they didn't achieve it with the invent of the automobile? Or the railroads?

Who's to say they acheived it at all?

*Dogscoff falls over laughing while all the Americans present pelt him with half-eaten Big Macs...

[PvK]

Originally posted by Mylon:
Yes, it may have taken America 300 years to get where we have today, but also consider:

1) It isn't a set thing. You can't say 300 years alter America has finally achieved "cultural center" status. Whos to say they didn't achieve it with the invent of the automobile? Or the railroads?

Since I defined cultural centers, I would say that the automobile would be a tech level achievement, not a facility, and that railroads were just part of the transportation infrastructure. They don't have that much to do with culture, although they may be a part of it, affect it, and certainly they would never have appeared without an advanced (essentially, European) civilization. I would say that building more than two facilities on a colony, or building a large facility like a resource production "complex", probably does involve developing a lot of transportation infrastructure, including the space-age equivalents of automobiles and railroads. These also will require tremendous amounts of design and engineering to develop survivable and effective Versions customized to operate in each planetary environment.

However, your question seems to be from a perspective that is still missing what I've been trying to explain about what culture is, and why there are cultural center facilities, and why they can't be built quickly. It's not that you couldn't, with a huge amount of work and materials, build the infrastructure of a civilized continent in a couple of decades. It's just that this would not be well represented by another cultural center facility in SE4. This is because culture contributes things that the duplication of does not result in an additive effect, the way the SE4 game engine would add them together. 1000 scientists will not develop the same technology 10 times as quickly as 100 scientists working from the same principles. Not to mention that building a bunch of lab space on a distant planet is not going to have an direct additive effect, either. Who here believes that in the future, we won't have enough real estate for all the science labs we need, and that by colonizing Mars and filling it with science labs, we could triple the rate of human scientific accomplishment, compared to having the labs and scientists stay on Earth with the same budget?

And that's only the research part.

2) Production is skewed by the fact that only one thing can be produced at a time. Such infrastructure as a city doesn't spring up overnight, but it also isn't the only focus of the people.

Yes, that's very true. Unfortunately for the golden ideal of completely accurate simulation, that's the way SE4 production works.

3) Cost is also skewed because colonies are self sustaining in nature. True, America has maybe consumed its own weight in organics, but sustaining the colonists is free in SEIV because they produce enough naturally to take care of themselves. It is production facilities or other things that cost extra.

Also true, and again, unfortunately there's no great way to do this in SE4 except to give the facilities large costs, or possibly to give them negative resource production (though this latter idea is marred by the obligatory multiplication by planet value).

4) They're also evolving things. It would be reasonable that if a new mining technique is discovered you shouldn't have to build half of the cultural center over again just to refine one part. The 50% cost factor may be unavoidable, but the tremendus cost of that very 50% assures that it will never happen (assuming multiple levels of cultural facilities).

Yep. Although, what you can do is build other facilities from the higher tech on the same planet, such as robotoid facotories, value improvement plants, computer complexes, etc. These have multiplicative effects with whatever else is on the planet, and don't have to have massive costs. This is probably what I should add more of, rather than struggling with the cost/upgrade system provided by SE4, which doesn't leave me much flexibility beyond what I've already done.

PvK