FreeOrion

"Population"? As someone already suggested. "Sustenance"?

"Population" as a distributable and stockpilable resource doesn't make sense. "Sustenance" is too vague, and even still seems unapplicable to robot type species.

I'm skeptical of whether any single term will be general enough to work for very different types of population. It makes sense for there to be planets populated by robots which produce food or health-sustaining stuff that is useful for human-populated planets, but other than a heavily story-motivated magical-scifi material will be equally effective at boosting the capacity of an inferno planet for robotic beings and a terran jungle-covered planet for human-like beings? Perhaps if we have "sentience essense" mines or somesuch, but that seems rather difficult to work with content-wise...

"consumables"?

Here's some more developed ideas:

Replace the "Farming" focus with "Growth" focus. It represents more generally all the stuff needed to keep population alive, and especially to expand it.

The Growth focus produces "consumables" or Growth Points (GP). GPs are not stockpiled. At the top of the screen GP would be shown as: "ICON 27/30". This would indicate that 30 GP were produced, but only 27 were used, i.e. 3 GP were wasted excess. The same format could be used for industry.

Depending on the EP of a planet you can have a certain amount of population for free, i.e. without spending GP to maintain it. This is the "Habitability" of the planet. If the Habitability of a planet is 20, you can support a population of 20 there without any GP production. Without techs, The Habitability of a hostile planet would be zero. Homeworlds would have an additional bonus to their Habitability. This more or less replaces the "Health" meter.

So the basic idea is that you can maintain a decent population on planets of a hospitable EP without focusing on growth. A blockade cutting off all GP could only "kill" a colony on a hostile planet. But if you want to increase your population and/or use hostile/poor planets, you'll need to provide some GPs. Blockades would still be a valuable strategy for throttling/ isolating planets, but it wouldn't be such an effective way to destroy most non-growth-focused.

There would be no "Food Consumption" meter. That's not an especially interesting way to vary species, IMHO.


Mechanics:
Here's the basic idea... No fancy formulas. Trying for the simplest, easiest to understand method that gets the job done.

GPs are applied first to maintain population, and then if any are left over to increase population (if possible).

Every population unit above the Habitability costs 1 GP to maintain.

It costs 1 GP to increase a planet's population by 1. Maximum growth per planet per turn is 1.

If there is insufficient GP to maintain the population, population will decrease by 1 per turn.


EDIT:
Here i said hostile planets should have a "Habitability" of zero, but i've changed my mind, it should instead be 1. That would eliminate the concept of colony "death" due to lack of GP, and take a lot of the sting out of GP allocation that doesn't go as the player might wish.

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My main concern is how to dole out the GPs. This has the same issue as food: there needs to be some automated - ie. not player manipulated - means to allocate a limited resource to planets. There's no obviously good way to do this.

For resources like minerals and industry (or production points), it works fine, since there is a global production queue that can determine where limited PP are spent.

But with food, if I have several planets that need GP to maintain population, and several others that could use GP to grow, how does the game decide where to spend them? If the user controls this by setting focus or otherwise indicating where growth should be prioritized, we end up with potential for excessive micromanagement being required.

Hence, I still want to make growth not based on a distributed finite supply, but instead make function through direct bonuses to target population of planets. Eg. every planet within 3 non-blockaded jumps of the growth-focused planet gets non-stacking +X to target population. X could vary from target planet to target planet, or depend on details of the source planet, just like food production would. But, there would be no reduction in the bonus to target planet 1 if target planet 2 got the bonus as well. This eliminates the need for the player to decide how to allocated a limited resource, or to make up some rather arbitrary rules about how the distribution is ordered.

Naturally i don't want to see any fiddly controls to determine where the GP should go.

Admittedly the situation for allocating food or GP isn't as ideal as a research or production queue. But i think what i've proposed (and/or what i'll here further explain) goes a long way toward eliminating the practical problems with allocation.

These would be the priorities for spending GP:

1) maintain population before growing new population
2) Growth focused colonies before other colonies
3) older colonies before newer colonies
4) high habitability colonies (i.e. good EP) before lousy ones
5) in the rare event of multiple colonies of the same EP founded on the same turn, flip a virtual coin.
(the order of #3 and #4 might arguably be reversed)

So if there is not enough GP to maintain all population above "Habitability", it is merely a question of finding out which colonies loose 1 population unit. Since 1 GP=1 population unit there's no need to figure out some optimal distribution

When you have enough for growth, your older and more habitable colonies get first pick, and will probably reach their ceiling sooner. This is plausible and easy to understand. The player may occasionally prefer a different order of allocation, but if a favored planet is getting left out, he can set it to "growth" for a while, or research better habitability techs, or simply produce more GP elsewhere.


In the previous post i said hostile planets should have a "habitability" of zero, but i've changed my mind, it should instead be 1. That would eliminate the concept of colony "death" due to lack of GP, and take a lot of the sting out of GP allocation that doesn't go as the player might wish.

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How about an empire-wide policy that dictates which worlds are most likely to get the GP?
Something along lines: "Frontier worlds", "Empire core", "Equal distribution"...
This could add a strategic choice (between having a few highly populated planets and some lesser settlements over having a lot of averagely populated colonies) without having to micromanage every single world.

In Settlers II there were some settings to prioritize assignment of troops to military structures basing on the distance to enemy lands, I'm thinking of something along these lines.

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Fiddling around with the locations of such growth-focused planets to make sure every planet is within 3 starlane jumps of one without having more such planets than are required is also exceedingly micromanagey - I recall playing a ~80 star game a while back when Industrial Centers worked that way, and making sure every industry focused system was within x starlane jumps of one was a huge pain, and my main motivation to have Industrial Centers give an empire-wide bonus.

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There's a bit of a difference for growth focus in that, potentially, there aren't any buildings that need to be produced to relocate the growth focus; just changing a planets focus would suffice.

Another advantage to a non-limited-resource system is that changes in need don't alter the supply available to other sinks. For example, if there were a single growth-focused planet producing a stable 10 GP that supplied several other planets that consumed 5, 4, and 1 GP per turn to be stable population, and then the 5 GP/turn planet was blockaded, the 4 and 1 GP planets might start increasing their populations until they consume 7 and 3 GP - all 10 GP used up. Then, if the 5 GP/turn planet is reconnected, there's a potential shortfall of 5 GP/turn, which might cause one or more of the planets to start losing population. A non-limited-resource system (eg. within distance get fixed bonus) would be more stable in this sort of situation, with whatever bonus the planets receive not depending on how many other planets are receiving bonuses and what priorities they are for allocation.

Also, what should determine how many GP a given planet can use to increase its target population? Is there no limit, so that a player can spend 200 GP increasing the population target of a single planet? Presently, food is used to maintain population and to allow growth at whatever rate the current and target populations can support, but food doesn't modify the target population or growth rate, so the max food allocated to a planet is whatever its population would be if food wasn't a consideration. With a direct bonus to population system such as I'm suggesting, it's easier to limit such target population boosting by limiting the size of bonus any single source can give, and by preventing stacking of bonuses. If there's instead a limit on GP allocation to planets, that makes things a bit more complicated, and likely makes an indicator for this information - such as the food consumption meter - necessary.

Yeah, that's an important difference, but parallels still exist. I believe the experience would be similar, if not quite so bad. Figuring out which colonies are covered in a GP zone, and which colonies are covered by redundant GP production, would very likely be a pain, in all but tiny empires.


That scenario isn't very troubling. Don't forget the blockaded population would have shrunk during the the turns cut off from food. If it hadn't shrunk enough to make up for the new usage--which is likely-- it would take 3 turns for the other 2 planets to grow enough to use up that extra GP, while it would take 5 turns for the blockaded planet's population to drop 5 units. So if the blockade ended before 5 turns, there would be an excess 1 or 2 population units. Growth production would have to be increased somewhere, or those 1, or 2 population units would die.

Obviously if you are that player, you don't want your population to die, but blockades are supposed to be disruptive and destructive. I don't like how currently a casual blockade can easily wipe out a colony, but i don't think we should try to nerf them too much. Anyway there are still plenty of situations in any proposed system where some population will die because of in the amount of supply or the the supply lines.

At least with my (or the current) system, when you need (for whatever reason) to start producing more GP to maintain a colonies' population, you can do that on any connected planet, rather than only on a planet within X jumps.




Gotta think about that one.

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Ugh; a better name than that is needed, regardless of the mechanics of the system.
I'm not objecting to the loss of some population due to blockading, and indeed my own suggestions include that occurring. Rather, I dislike that a blockade or new connection at one planet can have effects on other planets, possibly very far away from the location of the blockade or new connection due to an arbitrary-seeming ordering of allocations. Unless the player always has more growth/population boosting output than needed to support all planets at their max populations, then blockades and new planet growth won't really reduce population in the empire, but rather will just redistribute it around to a semi-random selection of other planets.

Is it feasible to maintain the desired feature - having bonus be available to any resource-connected planet - without needing to have the available bonus to population be finite supply and treated as a resource? There would probably need to be some way to require the player to have more than just one growth-boosting planet, but I'm not sure what that would be...
I don't really understand why needing to generate population boost on a nearby planet is so offensive...
Ideally, the limits for population increases by an empire would be an empire-wide value based on tech, similar to proposed empire-wide detection power mechanics. I'm not sure this is feasible though, as there would likely need to be different limits for different sizes or environmental qualities, and if things are varying that much, they might as well be a per-planet meter... But then you've got a rather obscure meter that determines how much additional target population a planet can have due to other planets producing additional resource (but not necessarily how much additional target population is actually provided due to supply issues).

Just to avoid needing to have "farming" planets near the planets they benefit?

In the current system, the norm is for the empire always to have enough food to sustain its population, with blockades and shortfalls being unusual circumstances, so blockades do currently reduce population in the empire.

Also, I don't see why new planet growth should reduce population in the empire...?

Well, you could have a certain number of planets that a single planet's growth focus could supply, and when there are more that that number of planets connected to the resource group, you would need another planet focused on growth.

I don't see really how that's preferable to having food as a resource though. You also lose some of the stuff you can do with it by virtue of it being a resource, like trading it to other empires, for example, or needing to expend it for special projects, like breeding space monsters, or something like that.

Edit: instead of making the system so quantized, we could say that all planets in a resource-supply-line-connected group have population growth/max population that's proportional to the number of growth-focused planets in the group, and inversely proportional to the number of colonies in the group. Diplomatically, this could allow "Growth Treaties" between empires with open borders, who could agree to share food within their borders, and empires who are bad at farming would pay empires who are better at it to produce "Growth" for them within their borders. This also gets rid of the problem of "which planet gets hit first?" because they all get hit equally.

It's because determining the minimum number of planets that need to be put on growth focus to ensure that every planet in the empire is within X starlane jumps of a growth-focused planet is not at all a trivial task.

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The problem isn't as unconstrained as placing industrial centres, though... With the IC's, it appears to not have mattered much what planet they are on as long as they are within 100, 200, or 300 uu (distance) of industry-focused planets. With growth boosting from planets, the amount of the bonus would depend on the amount of food the planet could produce, so it would only be useful to make your growth-boosting planets the ones which can actually produce lots of growth bonus. Ideally, you'd have a relatively small number of potential growth-boosting locations, which are not all equivalent, and picking which of those to use for growth or for something else (in cases where they might be useful for another purpose) would be less of a min/max problem... Perhaps more similar to picking city sites in Civ games.

I agree that the gameplay should triumph over realism, but the notion that a space faring empire does not possess technology required to transfer food and necessities over larger distance is disturbing.

There is a statistical possibility that there will be a group of planets rich in minerals and other perks (specials) but with hostile environment. There is a chance that a given empire will not be able to take hold of any farm-able planet within any hard-coded threshold for the proposed "local growth boost". So the (strategically important) mining colonies will be abandoned by the rest of the empire just because no freighter has good enough refrigerator to handle more than five jumps?

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There can / would be other ways of boosting planet target population, such as getting other species to colonize with, or techs that improve the colonizability of poor or hostile worlds regardless of their location.