FreeOrion

The secondary focus had a lot of baggage, which was why we dropped it. I wasn't much involved in that discussion, but i think moving to one focus was the right choice.

You can read the discussion that lead to dropping the 2nd focus here:
viewtopic.php?f=6&t=3565

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I understand and accept the reasoning that secondary foci would add incentive for micromanagement.

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[...] for Man has earned his right to hold this planet against all comers, by virtue of occasionally producing someone totally batshit insane. - xkcd

OK, i'm working on new, sane population numbers.

I think i'm going back to "max population = 100", since there is no longer food production.

Tentatively that will be approximately equally divided between:

base population,
growth
species
tech
specials

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I'd have thought base population and species were the same thing, and that species ability, techs, and specials would be the types of growth available... So I don't quite follow how that breakdown will work. But, I don't really need to at this point.

I wanted to get to this sooner, but things are stacking up. I'll be back from vacation the first week in July.

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OK, moving back to a 100 pt population scale...

Here's what i'm thinking. Instead of having rules about when a pop bonus can work or not depending on tech and quality, you just stack them all together. Bad environments have a negative population malus to overcome, but it doesn't matter what bonus you use-- as long as it is big enough you can live there. (There may be some exceptions).

Population bonuses (such as being the homeworld, or a growth special resource) will generally each add +5 for a huge planet and +1 for a tiny. No more 1/2 population point bonuses.

The "Good Population" pick is the exception, it is calculated last, so it is a percentage boost 125%.

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Maybe start adequate at 1/2/3/4/5 instead of 0/0/0/0/0 so there's a bit of variety at the start of the game? The name would also make a bit more sense; the planet is adequate to support population, though it's not very good...

I had it like that at first, but then i thought it would be more interesting if it was right on the edge-- a single tech, growth special, or homeworld-growth-focus would make it live-able.

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I like that as well - they are usable, but they would also typically need a growth bonus to survive, which would make them vulnerable to a blockade.

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

What do you all think of changing the pedia entries to something like this:

"... adds +1 population capacity per planet's size level.."

instead of the current,

"Increases the population capacity of Poor planets to 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 for Tiny, Small, Medium, Large and Huge planets, respectively."

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As long as there will be a glossary in 'pedia that explains planet size level.

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[...] for Man has earned his right to hold this planet against all comers, by virtue of occasionally producing someone totally batshit insane. - xkcd

Seems reasonable, since that's what the effect is actually doing. Of course the player needs to know that Tiny is size 1, etc.

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

Yeah, i think it would be useful if the 'pedia could support arbitrary articles and catagories.

I'd add a "Game Concepts" to help explain how different bits of the game work.

EDIT: In the meantime a macro could explain "planet size level" or whatever we call in in a uniform way.

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Categories no, but you can show arbitrary stringtable entries in the pedia by making a link to it using the internal link format.

A normal bit of content reference looks like [[tech TECH_NAME]] which will make a clickable link out of the stringtable replacement for TECH_NAME to an article about that tech. Internally, this works by being replaced by some text like <tech TECH_NAME>Human-Readable Tech Name</tech>. This is interpreted by the encyclopedia as a link, and Human-Readable Tech Name gets underlined with a link to the article on the tech TECH_NAME.

Something similar exists for arbitrary text, though not with the understanding of what the text means. You can add some text like <encyclopedia SP_GYISACHE_DESC>[[SP_GYISACHE]]</encyclopedia> which will be replaced by Gyisache underlined as a link. Clicking the link will go to a page that is the text in the stringtable entry SP_GYISACHE_DESC, but with no title or other information.

To make proper encyclopedia entries fully customizable, there'd probably need to be a separate file listing the articles, with separate title and main text fields, and probably something about how to index or categorize them.
I think it's better as it is. Introducing extra concepts that require a linked page to explain is needlessly complex when a single line of text explains it on its own.

This is now implemented in SVN.