i think the trouble is that the home planet is so out of whack with everything else. it seems to have artificially high number of pop (and hence resources) whereas other planets, if colonised with just the 1 arc, will pretty much unlikely ever to attain such pop.
i can only presume that's the case so that testing can be done.. no one will sit around waiting for months for something to happen to test stuff.
I reset the game a few months back, and I did make the home planets bigger, and increased the price of arcs. Balance is really hard to get right. Increasing the number of people per arc would probably be really helpful (I'm happy with the number of arcs you can produce in a turn), that would speed up the population curve quite a bit. Maybe up it to... 2000 people?
Trading -- I need to do some spring cleaning, there might be some problems. Also, the amount of resources you see on a planet is the surplus that's just sitting around, trade can occur without a surplus. It shouldn't occur if there's no way to make the commodity, and none has been left there (say by a previous trade). I want to allow purchasing of resources on the local market if you have the quatloos (i.e. you'd be able to build as many ships as you have quatloos to pay for the stuff to build them), but I haven't done this yet.
I keep wanting to add more stuff to the game, there's huge amounts of new technologies I want to put in, etc. Stand off weapons, more stuff for trading/piracy/diplomacy...
