Questions comments and general ramblings from a new player...

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Hello,
I started playing SE4 Last week and already feel somewhat addicted, I couldn't resist trying all the mods and new races I saw ... thus I started 4 games but didn't progress very far in either ..

So about the mods, I still wonder what's the difference (races apart...) between what seems the 2 most widely used : TDM and Devnull ? The readme are very brief about the changes.

I read about Proportions (of which I like the ideas) that it was designed for MP, so I'll got a try at a new PBW, thanks Nebula, we'll start today !

Now I must admit that the game is wonderful about how the races, the diplomacy, the tech trees and ship design/combat are implemented, but I've been quite disappointed with the colonization/economy process
Colonizing a new planet up to nearly-full capacity (at a given tech level) is a matter of 5-6 turns, 10 at most : send colony ship, add a pop trans (300 M population per ship, that's the USA whole population moved in amonth !! ), pop up 5 facilities at the rate of 1/turn, and in perhaps 2 game years a whole system has been colonized..
That's overly quick and easy ! And population is mainly useless, as facilities need nearly to noone to operate properly : how in hell can 10 M people produce more than 50% of what 2000 M people can do ???
Same for research : to max out RP the best way is to populate each colony with lots of Research Facilities... That really doesn't sound logical, science should need proper infrastructure, support, all what we on Earth worked for centuries to have here !

I supposed that for a long time my homeworld would give most of the empires economic output, now in a couple of years it's just an overpopulated big colony ... I know Proportion mod changes this but didn't try yet (cf above ).

And so the game tends too much towards "colony race" so as to have more planet "slots" just to put facilities, where it should be more oriented towards making in the long run viable colonies out of harsh places, IMHO that'll be more fun and challenging.

With a better economic model the game would be just *more than great*

Your thoughts ?