Population in SEIV

[geoschmo]

This isn't a new discussion. My suggestion might not even be a new suggestion. I am sure someone suggested it somewhere. I don't recall seeing anyone use it in a mod, but I could be wrong about that even.

There is a lot of funkiness with SEIV and population. It may not be very realistic, but on balance it's a very playable system. And that is the important thing anyway, more so than realism.

I mean if we think about how planetary colonization might really occur, it's more likely the initial colony would have thousands, not millions of colonists. Then once the colony was established maybe millions of people would move there over the months and years to follow. But that takes a hefty amount of micro managment to move those people around, especially in a more "realistic" system with regards to hom many people could fit on a ship. Unless you have some automatic system.

Maybe popultion transfer could be handled in the background, where you don't have to build the ships and physically move the people. You would send a colony ship that would start it off, then have a "population transfer window" where you set the population goals for each planet. These would be met gradually over time and would deplete the populated worlds automatically, offset by reproduction.

Of course in an emergency, or when dealing with other empires you could still load them in a cargo ship and ship them off like so much cattle too.

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.

But like I said, the current system may not be realistic, but it is very playable.

Maybe we could approximate some of this ourselves in a mod. Proportions tries, but even with it you are carting around a miilion people in a relativly small ship.

We'd have to change the scale in our minds. Anywhere you see 1M of population, read that as 1 thousand. Then greatly increase the population levels allowed on a planet. Instead of a medium planet holding 2,000M, make it hold 6,000,000M. If 1M is 1,000 people then 6,000,000M would be 6 billon people. Then a colony component would hold 4 thousand, a much more resaonable number.

I did some quick tests and the game will allow a number as high as 99,999,999 for the population number on a planet. Since the game views this in units of millions of people, this would be 100 trillion people. My thought is if you change the scale in your mind this becomes 100 billion people.

You could change all the pop limits in the planet sizes text file. then when you see a colony ship that can hold 4 million people you read it as a colony ship carrying 4 thousand people.

A densely packed population transport carrying 300 million people, the population of the USA, becomes a more plausible transport carrying 300 thousand people. Still a lot, but merely the size of a small city.

Some other things would have to be changed. You'd have to increase the population check, as proportions does. You'd have to decrease the militia per population, or at least make them much weaker comparitvly. Maybe make plantery damage less. This owuld make planets much tougher, which is good, but might make them too tough if you dont make some other changes.

Ideas?

Geoschmo

[Baron Munchausen]

Yes, this is another AI feature that could be added in SE V. If population had 'attitudes' toward things like habitability of planets, danger level of living in a particular system (planet/stellar events, tension/war with other empires, presence of space monsters? ), and economic conditions, then you could have 'automatic' migration of the sort that MOO 3 is promising.

[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

[Repo Man]

I would love it if population were handled almost exclusivly by competant AI. If I had my way, population movement should not be abstracted, rather keep the current system of transports in place, but have them on full AI control. Players would have an incentive to produce enough transports to meet movement demands, and a failure to have enough transports would adversely affect the economy.

Players would then have to worry about protecting these AI controlled transports against other empires raiders and dare I say, pirates and space monsters.

It would a lot to the game to have more to do than blindly expand.

[capnq]

In Roman numerals, 'M' is 1000.

[Fyron]

Hmm... this is going into Fyron's Quadrant Mod v2.00.

[geoschmo]

Originally posted by capnq:
In Roman numerals, 'M' is 1000.

Cool! So we call it the Roman Mod.

Of course once you hit 1000M it switches to 1B. B wouldn't by chance be the Roman numeral for Million would it?

Geo

[Fyron]

Geoschmo, I just tried this and got a RCE when hitting "End Turn". I started a game with a medium homeworld and I took Advanced Storage Techniques. Here is the entry for the medium planet (with other changes to it):

Name := Medium
Physical Type := Planet
Stellar Size := Medium
Max Facilities := 15
Max Population := 8000000
Max Cargo Spaces := 8000
Max Facilities Domed := 5
Max Population Domed := 1067000
Max Cargo Spaces Domed := 4000
Constructed := False
Special Ability ID := 0

Oh yeah, I made these changes to Settings.txt too:

Population Mass := 5
Reproduction Check Frequency := 100

[ July 10, 2002, 20:03: Message edited by: Imperator Fyron ]

[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

[geoschmo]

Originally posted by Imperator Fyron:
Geoschmo, I just tried this and got a RCE when hitting "End Turn". I started a game with a medium homeworld and I took Advanced Storage Techniques.

Alas, I am hitting the same wall. It appears maybe this will not work after all. I had not tried hitting end turn before when I determined the game would allow an 8 digit number for the population.

Geoschmo