FreeOrion

Still in brainstorming mode...

I realized my previous idea works better turned inside out. As before each EP is assumed to have very different things to offer, but instead of limiting a species to growth Bonuses from one EP, all nine EPs can provide stacking growth bonuses-- so you have the highest populations when you are supplied by one growth-focused planet of each EP.

This has some positive gameplay implications, as all nine EPs won't be accessible to you at the start of the game until you acquire several more species and/or research habitability techs. And it gives you a reason to have more growth focused planets.

This could be combined with your idea of the metabolism-based growth sub-foci, to multiply the number of growth-focused planets required to reach maximum population.

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Dunno... I would favour having fewer Growth-focused planets to increase their appeal as strategic targets, with the decision to have extra being a more important decision with large-scale consequences. Since this requires that there exist buildings which must be built to increase growth on a planet to its optimal level, this is also another opportunity to add some importance to building placement.

Of course in very large empires, the number you describe may be low enough to make each one important, but having a much smaller number to me seems more interesting.

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I finally played around with the latest binary for a while.
The main problem i noticed was that "Growth" no longer has a target. If i'm reading it correctly, when you set a planet to "growth" you get of the current capacity 100% instantly. There's no ramping up and ramping down like the other resources have. If somebody captures your breadbasket, you can instantly start up another elsewhere just as good (minus whatever growth buildings)

I'm not sure what the reason for subdividing growth into 20 levels is. Hopefully it's just a temporary technical necessity.
EDIT: i get it-- its the roundabout way to make sure only the biggest population bonus gets applied.

I had a colony relying on a growth planet. When i changed the foci, boom, the colony was gone. No starvation, no gradual decline.



We have a small number of foci to use for a large number of planets. I don't think we should have the goal of making any of the main foci only useful a few times per empire. That hurts the focus diversity of the remain planets as there are fewer useful foci to go around.

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Yeah. The rationale for that was that I wanted Growth to represent exactly the amount of extra population the planet is providing for other planets. This shouldn't be too high, ever, (I believe no more than 8 as things are now, which seems pretty reasonable - it was 20 when species bonuses were applied last), and for a species with no Growth bonuses, no more than 5. The disadvantage from switching between different Growth planets would be nothing more than a minor nuisance, rather than a real drawback, so I just made the meter unpaired. I think it would probably be good if most or all growth bonuses came from buildings rather than from techs directly, so without buildings, the best you could get would be growth of 1, plus species bonus.

It is a technical necessity, but not necessarily a temporary one; the options are to either:

a) Have the Growth planet directly give bonuses to planets in range as before. This prevents any way of selecting the largest bonus.
b) Have the planets getting the bonus select a bonus from their own effectsgroups based on some attributes of planets in range (in this case, within the same resource group).

b doesn't really work without discretized levels of growth, because as far as I know, there's no way to increase target population proportional to the Growth meter of the Growth planet, because we don't have reference to it. We just know that it exists because the activation condition was met. The way to work around that is to have the numerous effectsgroups that exist now - this way we know to an accuracy of 1 what the best Growth planet in range is, and we can give ourselves an appropriate target population bonus.

We don't need all 20 anymore though. At most, we'll need as many as the magnitude of the greatest Growth population bonus we'll want to be able to give, times the number of species groups, if we want to do that (and not all species groups need have the same max growth bonus, either).

That sounds like a problem with population decreasing towards target too rapidly, unless the colony was very very small, in which case it's what I would expect.


I don't object in principle to Growth being a commonly used focus, but it seems that it requires the rules for its benefits to become more and more complicated for the player to keep track of and optimize.

The difference between Growth and the other foci is that the benefit to using the other foci is always clear - you get more of whatever that focus produces. Growth doesn't produce anything, but rather gives a conditional bonus to other planets in the same resource group, according to some special rules, which makes its use more complicated. In that sense, it shouldn't be compared to the resource foci.

That being said, I wouldn't mind giving it a try if you want.

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Lines 85 and 87 of PopCenter.cpp:Roughly, these lines determine population change each turn. (The roughly is partly that target_pop has a minimum capped value of 0.01; if the actual target pop is less than that, then 0.01 is used.) If target_pop is near 0, population_fraction becomes about -cur_pop/0.01 or -100*cur_pop, and change_potential becomes about -100*cur_pop*cur_pop*0.1. If cur_pop is something like 5, then you get change_potential of -250, and your planet's population is instantly gone. It might be worth changing to something like:or
These will have somewhat different growth curves than at present, but should work better for increasing and decreasing populations when the target population can go to (or, if made possible, below) 0.

That seems like it will lead to very slow decreasing populations when the current population is near to target population. If target population is 0 and current population is 1, then it will take well over 10 turns (or in the case of the second formula, well over 100 turns) before the population even goes below 0.1 for either of the formulas you wrote, which seems like a bit much. It might be good to add some small constant multiplied by the sign of (target_pop - current_pop) to deal with that situation.

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Maybe the formula should be scaled according to some example situations:

How quickly should population drop from 1 to target 0?
How quickly should population rise from 1 (initial colony size, correct me if differs) to max population?
How quickly should an average population size drop to 0?

Answering questions like these could help fine-tune the formula.

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You can compile the code, so feel free to play around with things to find something that works well in all / most situations.

Do we need fancy formulae?

How about population increases or decreases at a basic rate, such as .25 pop per turn?

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Having growth rate depend on the difference between the population and target population means that having a larger target is useful even if the population is well below the target; a larger target increases the growth rate. Similarly, difference-dependence means additional penalties to target population will affect the rate at which population is lost. If growth is always at a fixed, then there's no benefit to having a higher target until a planet's population is maxed, and less concern about additional penalties if population is over the target population.

Well, in that case what about a standard ratio?

I.E The size of population loss/growth per turn would be 1/50th of the target population.
But there's a minimum size, say 0.1 pop units.

The numbers above might be improved, but there's something to be said for a growth rate that can be explained without algebra.
I grant that there's some value in the difference dependance you describe, but especially when bad stuff happens, i think it is desirable to have an easily understandable rate of population loss, so you can predict the time frame in which you have to solve the problem.

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If growth = max(target_pop/50, 0.1) isn't "algebra" then I don't think growth = pop*(target_pop - pop) / 10 is either... there's no solving for the unknown or similar; just (relatively) simple formulae.
There's probably no simple single population growth rule that has all the desired features. But, I don't think it's important that it be extremely simple to predict what growth will be, as long as the UI gives estimates or rates of changes and there are some relatively simple rules players can work with, like "larger target gives faster growth", and "target = how big planet will grow".
It might not work well to have a single formula for growth and decay then. Previously, there was a different formula for population loss when health was below 20 (the point where health effects changed from loss to growth), which was:Taking that and adapting to the new system of just population and target population, the change could beThat would give a nice sigmoid-esque growth curve, and a target-dependent rate of loss. The loss is 10% of the difference per turn, which means it'll take about 22 turns to fall from 1 to 0.1 (if I counted right). I don't think that's too terrible, but if you think it needs to be faster, then it could be / 5 instead of / 10.

More brainstorming on how to deal with growth foci...

Maybe the growth focus is only possible on planets with certain specials. The fluff concept would be that the production of food and raw materials in general is pretty trivia at our beginning tech level. Only on certain rare planets where rare and delicate resources can be found is "growth" or "mining" sufficiently important to be a planetary focus.

One of the points is to prevent having a bunch of growth focus option in every focus selector. These focus options would only appear on planets with certain specials.

There would be several (3 - 5?) different specials that boost organic growth. The effect of the growth specials would not stack with multiples of the same kind, but different specials would have a cumulative effect.

Similar specials would boost lithovore growth. The twist would be that the lithovore must choose via foci weather to use these specials for growth or minerals/production. That's the "con" side of being a species that has mining and growth bonuses in the same tech.

Robots with a little ingenuity could also have a set of growth specials different from lithovores.

Photosythesizers should probably not get their own set of specials, since they might belong to any of these three group.

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I like this general idea.

There should probably be a few buildings that can unlock the growth focus as well, perhaps for only a subset of species types, so players aren't completely dependent on finding specials. These buildings shouldn't be spammable as long as the bonuses don't stack.

I don't see why not. Possibly the synthetic foo spice isn't quite as effective as natural foo spice, or maybe the fact that you have to wait longer and invest PP & RP is penalty enough.


To clarify think of these specials as a source of something like spice or rare earths useful in tiny quantities, not a bulk neccesity, like corn or iron ore.


Scratch that.
The parallel bonuses for photosynthesizers should probably be provided only by stars of the correct type. One hybrid metabolism pick is enough: "cyborg"

"increases max population by +2 for organic species or by +1 for organic cyborg species" isn't too bad. Adding in rules for organic photosynthesizers and organic photosynthesizer cyborgs gets too crazy, IMHO.

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