Proportions mod: So confusing!

[geoschmo]

Now Director. Don't make me bring the smack down on you, ok? Just let it slide. Everyone is entitled to a mispeak now and then.

[DirectorTsaarx]

Originally posted by geoschmo:
Now Director. Don't make me bring the smack down on you, ok? Just let it slide. Everyone is entitled to a mispeak now and then.

Sorry - I really was trying to defend his good name; at least this community tries to police itself...

Anyway - everyone return to the topic at hand:

IMHO, Proportions does a very good job of slowing the game down and changing the emphasis from fast expansion and quick aggression. Beyond that, it has some neat ideas for technology, has led to us players learning new things about how certain facility abilities interact, and provided a new way to play a favorite game. Whether it's "realistic" (or, at least, more "realistic" than the unmodded game) is certainly open to debate.

To draw on an example from science fiction, the colonies in Larry Niven's "Known Space" series will certainly not compete with Earth as far as resource production (or research, or intelligence). They suffer from exactly the problems PvK points out, i.e. inhospitable conditions over most of the colony planet, but without the major technological advances postulated by Graeme and others (cheap power, cheap intelligent robotic work force, etc.).

On the other hand, that same series postulates a thriving "colony" of sorts in the asteroid belt that competes quite well with Earth, nearly surpassing it on occasion (IIRC). Maybe it was because of proximity to the homeworld; the Civilization series of games certainly models that aspect of an empire by imposing a production penalty on cities based on distance from the capitol (modified by infrastructure - roads, railroads, etc.). Now, as someone mentioned previously on this thread, SE4 doesn't provide that sort of modeling, probably because trade routes are not really modeled (there's some handwaving in the manual, and I'm not certain I want the added micromanagement of establishing trade routes in SE4; but then sometimes I would like that feature, so I could focus on something besides blowing up my neighbor's ships and committing genocide ).

Anyway, it's certainly been an interesting debate; postulating future technology and when it will be available is a favorite game among engineers.

One final point - I have to agree with PvK about research centers not necessarily being linearly additive. Research institutions (at least the ones I've worked for) are notorious for competing with other labs (or even with other scientists in the same lab), thus reducing the additive effect (and negating some of the "parallel processing" benefits). There's some benefit in that each lab will work harder to get the result first, but I wouldn't say that two labs competing with each other will get a job done twice as fast. What's the old saying, "9 women can't have a baby in a month"? Now, research isn't exactly the same thing, but forcing 9 labs to work on a small piece of some large project isn't necessarily going to result in completion of that large project 9 times faster than if a single lab was working on it. In that case, there are two limiting factors:

• Length of time required to complete the slowest/hardest/most complex piece of research
• Coordination between the labs to ensure that each lab's result will interoperate with the other labs

That first point comes up in discussions of parallel processing on computers; no operation can be performed faster than the slowest task (or, more completely, than the longest chain of serial tasks, since some tasks depend on results from other tasks). The second point has bitten me in the... neck... repeatedly. Two separate Groups come up with elegant solutions to their respective pieces of a problem, and the solutions are completely incompatible. Now, if we assume absolute dictatorial management, that second point becomes less of a problem; but, in SE4 terms, unless your race description includes something like "fanatical devotion to the leader", I'd be hard-pressed to guarantee that the scientists will pay much attention to said dictator.
Anyway, that's my two cents on the current discussion. Feel free to disagree...

[oleg]

Originally posted by DirectorTsaarx:
One final point - I have to agree with PvK about research centers not necessarily being linearly additive. Research institutions (at least the ones I've worked for) are notorious for competing with other labs (or even with other scientists in the same lab), thus reducing the additive effect (and negating some of the "parallel processing" benefits). There's some benefit in that each lab will work harder to get the result first, but I wouldn't say that two labs competing with each other will get a job done twice as fast. What's the old saying, "9 women can't have a baby in a month"? Now, research isn't exactly the same thing, but forcing 9 labs to work on a small piece of some large project isn't necessarily going to result in completion of that large project 9 times faster than if a single lab was working on it. In that case, there are two limiting factors:

• Coordination between the labs to ensure that each lab's result will interoperate with the other labs

That first point comes up in discussions of parallel processing on computers; no operation can be performed faster than the slowest task (or, more completely, than the longest chain of serial tasks, since some tasks depend on results from other tasks). The second point has bitten me in the... neck... repeatedly. Two separate Groups come up with elegant solutions to their respective pieces of a problem, and the solutions are completely incompatible. Now, if we assume absolute dictatorial management, that second point becomes less of a problem; but, in SE4 terms, unless your race description includes something like "fanatical devotion to the leader", I'd be hard-pressed to guarantee that the scientists will pay much attention to said dictator.
Anyway, that's my two cents on the current discussion. Feel free to disagree...

Actually, It is a good thing that several labs are working on similar projects - without peer review there would be no way to assure reliability and reproducability (sp.) of data. There would be no Science as we know it.

[DirectorTsaarx]

Originally posted by oleg:
Actually, It is a good thing that several labs are working on similar projects - without peer review there would be no way to assure reliability and reproducability (sp.) of data. There would be no Science as we know it.

Good point; and that provides further support for the notion that multiple labs do NOT provide linear increases in technological progression. The science may be more accurate, thanks to peer review, but that doesn't make 4 labs twice as efficient as 2 labs...

[geoschmo]

On the other hand it's entirely possible that for some topics of research four labs would be more than twice as efficent as two labs. Sometimes in research and development the total is greater than the sum of the parts. Because most of the time involved in coming up with new technologies is trying and ruling out possibilities that end up not working, and working along until a fortuitous happenstance occurs. The more different people you have working on these different posibilities in different places simultaneously, the more chance for someone to hit on one of these discoveries.

Geoschmo

[Fyron]

Just because you build more labs does not mean that you will instantly gain new staff to work in those labs. You can only have so many qualified researchers. Throwing a lot of money into it doesn't necessarily mean that you will get more Newtons, Eintsteins, Hawkings, etc.

[geoschmo]

Very true. However there is often a difference between pure scientific discovery and technological advancment. The greats that you mention and others like them are exceedingly rare. Most of technology and invention is a gradual process of hard work and experimentation that is built on the work of these greats. "Standing on the shoulders of giants". And often great intuitive leaps have been made by otherwise obscure researchers that never did anything truely notable before or after their "one great discovery".

The great theoretical physics done by Einstein and others uncovered the principles of atomic power, but it was the grunt work done by many labs all over the world that put the theories into pratical applications like nuclear reactors and nuclear weapons. Whether or speed of advancment in this grunt work is linerly related to the number of people working on the problem is debatable. Likely reasonable arguments could be made on both sides. I am not sure if it's possible to ever know for sure, even for past discoveries, much less predict future ones.

Don't get me wrong though. I am not trying to make the case that Proportions somehow "has it wrong". I am simply engaging in a philisophical discussion.

I tend to take a much more abstract view of all of this stuff in SE4 anyway, rather than try to shoehorn it into a strict realistic view. I see research in SE4 as being the more practical application side of things. It's the R&D. In many cases "more money" is exactly what brings about innovation.

Geoschmo