FreeOrion

I just realized that this is impossible... switching to plan B...

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As i've said, the thing i object to is the limited range effect of the new "farming" thing. Since it requires bunches of little overlapping food distribution ranges, there's no easy way to at a glance see which planets are supporting which, or to see what the results of changing a planet to or from farming. I don't think an easy-to-use overlay GUI is possible to show what's going on. The annoyingness of the current system is not yet fully evident, since the farming focus is entirely optional bonus, there are not yet any bad effects from getting a planet cut off from food.

It seems Geoff's main goals are:
a) to avoid food stockpiles
b) to avoid food distribution decisions.

I'm totally on board with "a", and OK, with "b" as long as usability/understandability are not sacrificed.

There are however, other ways to achieve "b" that don't involve limited range. This is a brainstorming post, so i'm going to list some without going into too much detail.

1) Ratios not Resources
Farming provides a target population bonus based on the number of farming planets to non-farming planets. So if you have 5 farming colonies in connected system of 20 colonies, the ratio is 1-to-4. All connected colonies would get a certain bonus to target population. If the empire founded 5 new non-farming colonies, the ratio would then be 1-to-5, and the population bonus to all connected colonies would be significantly reduced. The population tooltip would announce the ratio, so you don't need to count all the planets to see what's happening. Farming/Growth/Food technologies would adjust the amount of the population bonus for any given ratio.
Elaboration:
Perhaps the farming focus on a Tundra planet can only benefit species with the Tundra EP.


2) Resources but Shared Alike
Food would be a resource again, but there's no stockpiles, health or fancy distribution rules.
You take all the food generated that turn, in a connected group of planets. You subtract the total population of that group from the total food. If the number is negative, the population of all planets in that group goes down by the same amount. If it is positive, the population goes up by the same amount on all planets.
Example:

10 planets
9 citizens each -- total 90 citizens
95 food generated
that makes 5 more food than citizens,
so 5 new citizens are divided among 10 planets,
= 9.5 citizens each -- total 95 citizens

Elaboration:
The maximum rate of growth could be capped, though that's probably not necessary, as food production won't rapidly increase.

I maybe have some more i need to process...


Is there any reason we can't have a negative target population? If we can, then we can make many of these population-related effects simpler, and sort of simulate health, without a health meter. I.E. give a -2 to target population for a health-hurting special without worrying weather that went below zero would be much simpler than what we have currently.

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What I was thinking of doing, at least in the short-run, was have the best bonus in a supply group be applied to all planets, greatly decreasing the number of farming planets needed, but increasing their importance enough to warrant the construction of some buildings.

Currently, I'm just having it so that the only thing distinguishing different farming planets is environment (only Good provides bonuses), and farming skill.

It would be nice if there was still a farming meter, so that there could be more other things that affect the farming bonus. If the farming meter could only take a certain number of discrete values (say, 10 or 15), then there would only need to be that many effectsgroups in each species description to pick out the best available bonus.

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Could you elaborate on what you can do with a farming meter instead of just direct modifications to other planets' target populations?

Note also that having a two-tier meter dependency like this - something modifies farming, and then other meters are modified depending on farming - is probably a bit prone to glitches or delayed appearance of results, as it might take a turn or multiple meter updates to propagate changes, and there might not be enough such updates per turn to function as intended.

Also, this meter will need to be renamed. Presumably things other than "farming"-related content would be expected to modify how much population boost a planet can produce... Even just "health" type content doesn't have anything to do with increasing output of edibles. Calling it "farming: also reverts to the human-centring naming scheme that is unsuited for other species which can't reasonably be explained as consuming food in the same sense. And regardless of those details, it's really a "population boosting" meter; "farming" doesn't describe its function or meaning.

I think "Growth" is the best suggestion so far.
As in, "This planet is set to the Growth focus."

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By moving the effectsgroups which actually provide the boost to that of the species receiving the boost, it becomes possible to select only the largest of a group of possible bonuses (which is what I've implemented). It would be possible to have a plethora of effectsgroups in each species definition to cover all possible combinations of EP, species farming aptitude, tech, etc, but it's far more understandable and maintainable if the relevant bonuses are applied based on a single attribute of the farming planet, which can then itself be modified by various things.

I haven't observed any significant problems so far.

How does "Growth" sound? The focus should also be renamed.

Edit: ninja'd. Seems like Growth sounds pretty good.

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Sustenance Focus?
Reproduction Focus?

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So, what are we going to do about species that aren't organic, or don't consume food? It doesn't make a whole lot of sense that the Laenfa get a population bonus by being near a Hidden Gardener planet.

Perhaps we should use tags to segregate species based on what they use as sustenance, so a "Photosynthesizing" species would be able to get bonuses from a "Photosynthesizing" planet with the growth focus, a "Biomass-consuming" species would get bonuses from a "Biomass-consuming" planet with the growth focus, etc.

Also, it might be nice to start considering how the tech tree can be altered to accommodate such types of species - so something like Orbital Farming would give a Growth bonus to only "Biomass-consuming" species, "Chlorophyll Boosters" would give a Growth bonus to "Photosynthesizing" species, etc., whereas something like Cloning Center would give a Growth bonus to all Organic species.

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It depends on how you look at it. Maybe the Gardener is growing fertilizer.

If you are making a distinction between "Photosynthesizing" and "Biomass-consuming", what exactly is the "Photosynthesizing" planet shipping to it's leafy brethren? Bottled sunlight?

While i would like to explore different rules for rather different types of life, i don't think this is an especially good place to make a distinction. Just because i'm an human, doesn't mean i can't manufacture oil & batteries for robots, and fertilizer for plants, as well as biomass for various organic life, etc.. This was part of the reason for changing the name away from "farming", so the work of the "growth" focus could more logically apply to non-organics-- and it should IMHO include all the other consumable stuff that supports a civilization.

Differences between Animal, Mineral & Vegetable, etc. species, should IMHO not be perfectly parallel, and we should only have as many groups as can be given distinct and interesting mechanics. I've been thinking some about this.

For instance, high populations for "Photosynthesizers" could be in large part about begin around the right kind of star. Here i've proposed 10 star types that come in 3 (or 4, or 5 sizes depending on what you do with neutrons and Black Holes)To broad-brush things into a understandable mechanic, photosynthetic species would get a big growth bonus for living under one of the 3 big star types, with decreasing growth bonuses (or increasing maluses) for the decreasing sizes. No matter what their EP, there's always a big one no more than one step away. There would be less to do to get large populations of photosynthesizes, but they have fewer places were the ideal star and EP coincide.



Before we do that, we should probably have a decent idea what the basic groups would be and how the mechanics work. Because species could also be accommodated by altering the description.

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I think this is a problem that has to be adressed before some other things. The three options Geoff provides will have a big influence (i.e. limits) on what can be done with species, techs and environments.

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Or leafy population units. That's presumably the case for all planets getting a growth bonus from Cloning Center.

That does make sense, but there's still the issue of why my Exobot population goes up when I research Orbital Farming. Is it implied that methods used to create Human food can be applied to making oil and batteries?

The value of switching to "Growth" isn't lost when not every species' Growth boosts every other species' population, since we can still use the same meter sensibly for non-organic species, but have different things affecting it.

It might not be unreasonable to have different growth foci (using the same Growth meter) for each group of species (assuming relatively few such groups), and have species' effects groups check if the Growth planet is set to the right focus. The extra Growth-focused planet(s) required to maintain a diverse population, and the need to research other techs which increase the growth meter when set to the other species' group's Growth focus would be a cost of having radically different species in your empire. This also gets rid of the conceptual problem of researching a Farming-related tech and having it increase a planet's Growth, thereby increasing the population of a planet of robots.

Growth boni are currently population independent.

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So the way it is rigged now makes it impossible to tag Orbital Farming so it only effects organics?


I don't disagree.

A somewhat parallel method would be to limit the "growth" produced on a Toxic planet to benefiting only species of the Toxic EP. The idea behind this each EP has a totally different biochemistry and environment, so it's only practical to produce stuff for Terran species on Terran worlds. Either approach falls apart logically if you examine it too closely, but that shouldn't matter, as long as the rule is simple.

On the down side, either sub-division of growth production makes it a lot harder to find a planet 1 jump away that will work. On the plus side having different varieties of "growth" brings us closer to the point where we don't need a distance limit on effect.

I've started a wiki page for species picks ideas, especially different methods of growth.

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Definitely not just by changing the tech itself. It would be possible to do it by changing the species description in a way that totally undermines the relative simplicity of the current setup, but that's like, bad.

That would work too, though there are probably more situations in which it obviously doesn't make sense, such as Humans farming for the Terran-loving Silexians.

The current system is already set up so that the planet just needs to be within resource supply range. I decided to opt for rare, important growth planets rather than never-used growth planets.

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Can you explain what you are thinking in a little more detail: who would get these different type of growth foci, where/when would they be available, etc.




Ok, cool.
Something to make the "growth" focus useful for more planets, would be if population growth towards the target was more rapid on a planet set to "growth".

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I was thinking that potentially all species, unless it really doesn't make sense in a specific case for some reason or other, would have all the different growth foci available, so there's no problem with the Silexians or the Cynos farming for the Humans, but they can't make fertilizer or oil and batteries at the same time. Maybe some conditions could decrease Growth on particular planets with particular types of Growth foci, for instance when trying to farm human food on a radiated planet, but that's more of an afterthought. Specific foci could/probably should be disabled when there are no species of a particular type to grow, within the planet's resource group.


That could be interesting - something like MoO2's Housing. I worry though, that setting new planets to Growth will always be a necessary (in the sense of always being advantageous) first step for new colonies (as it somewhat tended to be in MoO2)

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