Population in SEIV

[Fyron]

Increase the structure of weapon platforms to compensate, and then increasing the dmg of planetary weapons isn't a problem.

[Baron Munchausen]

Originally posted by geoschmo:
Right, those would require some hard code changes. What do you think abou tht esecond half of my post about changing the scale of population in SEIV. That could be done in a mod without any code changes. I may be missing some points though that could make it totally unworkable.

Geoschmo

Yes, changing the scale would help in some ways. You'd better remember to fix the population bonuses or every colony will be at max production in a hurry. But having a ship only able to move a few thousand colonist would be nice, and population growth would be much more realistic. This would slow the game even more, of course. But apparently many people like the way Proportions works and it slows the game, too.

[Baron Munchausen]

Originally posted by geoschmo:
Ok, so seriously I am looking for problems with this idea. The first thing that comes to mind is if you multiply the polpulation by 1000, you've just made planets 1000 times harder to destroy. I am all for making planets tougher, but I haven't heard anyone suggesting they need to be 1000 times tougher. TO counter this some you can reduce the damage to kill one pop in the settings.txt file. It's at 10 by default. So you reduce this to 1 and it's only 100 times harder than it is now to destroy a colony. Is this too tough? We can increase the power of planetary weapons to help with this, but will it be enough? And if it is does it take Weapon platforms completely out of the equation. There are some details to work out in this before anyone tries implementing this change.

Next would be reproduction. If we change the scale of the population numbers, but not counter that somehow with the reproduciton then people skip right over rabbits and start breeding like bacteria. That's no good. We can change the reproduction check frequency. Not sure how high you can make it. I'll have to test that some. Is taht all you would need to do to correct this? Maybe I am missing something else important. along these lines.

Geoschmo

Actually, making planets harder to destroy is not a bad thing. We had a whole thread about how ridiculously easy it is, remember? But do change the number of militia per point of population! Or planets will not only be indestrucible but unconquerable. If we changed militia by a factor of 1000 just like population we'd then have a very real incentive to invade rather than slag planets. The difficulty of just killing everyone on a planet would be very high.

As far as reproduction, we can reduce it somewhat, yes, but if you scale it back to make large planets seem 'realistic' you'll make new colonies unable to grow. Dropping the default reproduction rate to 5 percent would be good. I wish we could limit the bonuses from happiness but only production is modifiable.

[ July 11, 2002, 00:41: Message edited by: Baron Munchausen ]

[Phoenix-D]

"Reproduction Check Frequency := 100"

OK, someone explain this line to me. I'm reading it as the planets are checked and the pop multiplied by the reproduction number every X turns.

That would make this kind of silly, considering you'd only get new population once every decade. Wouldn't decreasing the reproduction a lot be a better solution?

Phoenix-D

[geoschmo]

Originally posted by Phoenix-D:
"Reproduction Check Frequency := 100"

OK, someone explain this line to me. I'm reading it as the planets are checked and the pop multiplied by the reproduction number every X turns.

That would make this kind of silly, considering you'd only get new population once every decade. Wouldn't decreasing the reproduction a lot be a better solution?

Phoenix-D

Well, yeah kind of it would. But the problem is the base reproduction rate is only 10 percent as it is. If you reduce it any lower than 5 and every planet with less than plesant conditions will have zero reproduction. Not only every ten years, never.

I wish that this was doable. The more I think about this the more I like it. But I can't seem to get past the RCE's. I guess we could still change the scale, but less than 1000. Maybe 100. But it will be harder to equate in your head. I didn't want to have to do a bunch of calculations. Ah well.

Geo

[Atrocities]

CLONES

[PvK]

Damage resistance: I think 100x the current levels is completely reasonable.

Reproduction: Changing the number of pop units this way is actually going to reduce the repro rate rather than increase it, because reproduction rate is linear except for the rounding error (minimum +1 per check). However, as I pointed out in Proportions, the default set's base repro rates are about 10x faster than actual human industrialized reproduction rates. That's why I set the repro check frequency to 10 (once every 10 turns) in Proportions.

Range check error: Tell MM and send a saved game, and he might fix it.

Overall, this is a nice idea, though I don't think it's a lot different from what I am doing in Proportions - it just has higher-grain less abstract numbers for population. I don't think of population units as necessarily representing one million civilians in Proportions. To me they mainly represent a level of effective workforce, including their equipment and survival necessities. The fact that they double in one year definitely does not represent in my mind that they reproduced and raised and educated childen at that rate. I think of it more abstractly, and I assume that there must be numerous small civilian craft that transport civilians and goods around (for example, this is the only way blockades make any sense). The natural population increase may take this into account.

In fact, I recently had a slight misgiving about how literal my treatment of population in Proportions is, compared to the following interpretation:

Another way to think of population is as if they are 1000 people each, but without increasing their numbers. In this interpretation, what they represent are 1000 highly-trained, educated, appropriate-age, healthy, colonization-equipped personnel who are under the emperor's control. Civillians who are not highly-trained, have health or age problems, or who for social reasons are not ready to serve as colonists, are not represented by populaion units (maybe by facilities, or by nothing). That is, they only represent the people who matter for the purposes they are used in the game.

Anyway, there are a various interesting ways to interpret and represent population. I'm pretty happy with the way Proportions works, but I'd be curious to see an attempt like Geo suggests here, too.

PvK

[Skulky]

I don't.

I am ever caught up in Starfire via Shiva Option. But they were able to take out worlds above max pop levels wiht a few hudnred fighters loaded with FRAMs. Antimatter does a number. What are CSMs made of?

[Phoenix-D]

CSMs are nukes.

Skuly has a point; some of the weapons in SE4 would do serious damage to a planet, perhaps to the point of rendering it unlivable even if you *didn't* kill everyone off.

Phoenix-D

[StarJack]

GEOSCHMO:Also, why can't you have a domed colony exsist side by side with races that breathe that atmosphere? That would require some changes, but it would be neat.

I have that situation in a game against the AI, although it was quite by accident. My race breaths oxygen and I captured a methane breathers planet. Planet next to it was methane, and I remembered from reading this forum how you could use Transports to expand domed planets. I accidentally loaded a transport up that had 1 oxy breather and the rest methane, and accidentally dumped them (what I get for getting in a hurry) on the methane planet I captured.
I've been off-loading like crazy from that planet, trying to get that 1 oxy breather the heck out of there, but the transports just keep picking up the methane breathers.
I'm close to emptying the planet now, and figure I'm going to wind up with that 1 flippin' oxygen breather left.
Your comment just stuck out because I wish I didn't have this situation!