FreeOrion

I've noticed that the projected resource production doesn't take into account change in population. This makes it impossible for a planet with max farming of 10 to experience population growth if it is not connected to the main empire, since it will predict that there is not enough food to sustain more than one unit of population, when in fact, the population would be entirely self sufficient in terms of food production. On a somewhat related note, it would be helpful if effects such as would show up on the resource tab in the brackets for change in mineral stockpile, though that can probably wait for when the resources are tooltip-able to display all the sources of those resources...

Also, I've noticed that this won't return a valid value (i.e. game crashes on startup when it's in a tech), whereas something like this will set it to tiny. It would greatly reduce the number of effects groups needed to make a poor or hostile world inhabitable if it were possible to set max population to current population plus a multiple of planet size. This isn't really necessary for functionality of course, just elegance and ease of readability of the effects groups, which as you've pointed out, aren't really priorities, so if it's at all difficult, there's probably not much point...

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Warning: Antarans in dimensional portal are closer than they appear.

Think of the (potential) new population as unable to work for the first turn it exists, so it needs a surplus of food to survive for a turn before it can start working.


This probably won't happen for a while. The way effects accounting is currently set up is designed to track what effects and source objects work on a particular target object's particular meters. Effects that act on empire-level statistics like total resource output, resource output within the stockpile group, or direct changes to the stockpile would need a separate system set up.


This is consistent with the documentation about data types in content scripts.


You should be able to specified more than one planet environment rating at a time...

and have both be matched by a condition.

"Planet environment" and "Planet size" aren't numbers, so conditions or effects shouldn't be written that treat them as numbers, even if you could hack something together that would work if a particular number were assumed for a particular size or environment level.

Also, "set max population to current population plus a multiple of planet size" is just wrong. (Almost) never set a max value to some function of a current value, and (as above) don't think of size as a number, even if a (integer) number works as a size in some contexts.

My difficulty with this is gameplay oriented rather than conceptual. Currently, poor planets have a base farming meter of -10, which means that when they have both foci set to farming (after the appropriate tech is unlocked to make them colonizable), their meter is exactly 10 and they can't grow, even though they should be self-sufficient. The alternative would be to make the afore-mentioned tech give a bonus to farming as well, but it doesn't seem reasonable to me that a poor planet should be able to contribute positively to the imperial food stockpile.

I'm already using that occasionally, though for most situations, I would want to treat planets of different environments differently. However, the bulk of the effects groups come from specifying different values for different planet sizes.

Sorry, that was a bit unclear. I meant the current value for max population, as described by the text editor excerpt.

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Warning: Antarans in dimensional portal are closer than they appear.

I don't see hostile planets being (initially) unable to grow on their own as a problem... It means the player needs to reserach a tech to increase their food output, or needs to connect them to the imperial resource web to supply extra food from elsewhere.


It would only be contributing a small amount, and only when focused entirely on food production. I don't see why poor planets should be able to produce enough food for growth of their own, but not enough to share... what's more reasonable about one than the other?


Why do you need to do this? For resource meters, the impact of an increase is already multiplied by the population, which is dependent on size. For population itself, just give a small fixed bonus (+2 or so?) regardless of planet size.

Hostile planets are a slightly different matter, and on that point, I agree. Hostile planets should not be able to feed themselves as soon as they are able to be colonized. Poor planets on the other hand, are a less extreme scenario, and should be treated as such, IMO. Also, the player might become frustrated, since there's no obvious reason why there shouldn't be population growth on a planet with sufficient food to feed all of its population and health > 20.

If poor planets can make enough food to share with the rest of the empire, then, once the appropriate tech is researched allowing colonization of poor planets, it makes the difference between poor and adequate planets regarding food production only quantitative rather than qualitative, i.e. how much can this planet contribute to food production? rather than can this planet contribute to food production at all? It's also a potentially annoying waste of resources if the planet has to produce more food than they appear to need in order to grow, IMO.

Naturally there's no reason to do this for resource meters. For population however, is it reasonable that when Poor and Hostile planets are able to be colonized, that all planets have the same max population, regardless of size?

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Warning: Antarans in dimensional portal are closer than they appear.

I think that not having a food surplus is a fairly easy to understand reason why a planet isn't growing... regardless of its type, size, or rating...


If you want poor planets to not produce food surpluses, then don't make effects that give poor planets a high enough food meter to produce food surpluses...

I can see your point about being able to grow without being able to export, but isn't it also interesting and qualitatively distinct to have poor planets able to support themselves without empire support, although not able to grow without empire support? This would be in contrast to hostile planets that would need empire support to maintain population (due to not producing enough food on their own, even when double-focused on farming) or adequate or better planets that would be able to grow on their own.


A slight adjustment of expectations of food needed to grow resolves this: you need more than enough to maintain the planet's population.


Depends on the means by which they were made colonizable. If it's something like habitation domes, presumably the domes could be the same size for a given tech regardless of the size of the planet...

That's not really what most players would expect. Well, it's not what i expected anyway. I guess I could give some explanation of this in the tech description, since that's the situation in which its most likely to come up...

I suppose it is, now that you mention it.

Actually, it's an application of Xenological Genetics, the idea being that the race can be adapted to the conditions of a poor planet, to a certain extent. But even from a gameplay perspective, I don't really see a reason to remove the significance of planet size for poor and hostile planets. At any rate, its not a big concern, since the functionality of what I'm trying to do is still there, even if it does require lots of effects groups.

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Warning: Antarans in dimensional portal are closer than they appear.

It's really a basic game mechanics issue, and not something that should be explained in a tech description.

Another issue is stability of the system. If you're just thinking about a single planet, it doesn't make a different whether population can grow with farming = 10, as in either case, the population will feed itself. But if multiple planets are sharing food, then you could have situations where planets are importing food to maintain their population and the empire has no surplus of food, and then the importing planet's population grows above the available supply of food, causing population to starve on the next turn.

It should probably be explained somewhere, or changed so it's more intuitive.

I didn't mean to say that the population should be able to grow beyond the available supply of food. I just meant that resource production should reflect projected changes in population growth, which would allow a self-sufficient world to increase in population. If this were the case, the food importing world in your example still wouldn't be able to grow beyond the available food supply, since there would be no increased food production to take into account when determining population growth. A world with 10 farming wouldn't be growing beyond the available supply of food, because the available supply of food would take into account projected population growth.

Of course, I don't know if that would even be possible. Looking at it now, it seems kind of circular, but as I said before, it needs to be explained somewhere if its not changed, IMO. Probably the encyclopedia would be the best place?

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Warning: Antarans in dimensional portal are closer than they appear.

That's the issue... If population growth is determined by available food, then available food can't be determined by projected population, which depends on population growth.


There needs to be a lot more in-game help and explanitory text, and a reasonable way to show it or look it up. A lot needs to be added to the UI for that to work well, though.

I hope you don't mind me posting this here - just a sketch I've just finished, that doesn't belong to the Trith.


Asteriod Hull, hiding

I really like what's being done here btw. Unfortunately I'll have to wait for a new release to test all this sweet new content. It crashes my 0.3.13, because of a stringtable problem(that has been fixed AFAIR).

Try kroddn nightly build

I'm using windows, so that doesn't work for me. Geoff might be able to help me out though.

While I'm not yet finished with the ships tree, I have polished the Growth tree extensively. Instead of absurdly complicated shape it was at first and the annoyingly non-sensical shape I first revised it to, it now has the lovely shape of the delta operator (when viewed as if the left was the bottom). All the trees will of course have its own interesting and unique, but logically structured shape. There are a few theories which need another application, such as Nanotech Cybernetics, which only has Bioterror Facilities, and that doesn't really make much sense... and there are a few applications which need a few more effects, but they will surely be filled out as the game goes along. I think the growth tree is quite nice now.

In terms of what's left with the ships tree, my remaining tasks include the following comments from Geoff:



and a general reworking of the shape of the main tree is probably in order. Also, in the spirit of not "copying MoO unnecessarily", I should probably rename Zortrium Armour as well...

Also, before I do anything with the mechanics of shipyards, I'd like to know what you've ("you" in this case should probably include pd) got in mind for displaying shipyards in combat. If shipyards don't replace each other, is only the most advanced one displayed in combat? Could the models be made in such a manner that when all of them are displayed it just looks like one big shipyard? What about when shipyards of different types are displayed? Should a planet even be allowed to have more than one type of shipyard (my opinion is "no", for the sake of discouraging "mixing" between ship types)? The way it is now, only one shipyard ever need be displayed in combat, and the player cannot (unless he deliberately takes advantage of inadequacies in the production system) have more than one type of shipyard on the same planet.

Anyway, here are the latest files:

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Warning: Antarans in dimensional portal are closer than they appear.

I suspect your terraforming won't work because the source object is the building itself, not the planet it's on. I might be mistaken, though.

Also, you can probably do the terraforming building with just two effects groups, half of which set the planet type to target.PlanetType + 1 or target.PlanetType - 1 as appropriate for which side of the EP wheel the current planet type is on.

Also, make sure you're not deleting or de-modifying strings that have recently been added or changed in SVN.

For the in-battle representation of shipyards, just think of each addon as a separate orbital building. They don't need to appear as part of the single shipyard, but can be nearby as a separate structure.