Recalibrating Population & Production

[Sloth]

Re-reading the topic again, i can only assume that this change wanted to accomplish the following things:

1. Make the production meter bars helpful in all stages of a game.
2. Make the numbers more meaningful/easy to read.

Here is what i see during testing:
I build a colony on an adequate small panet and leave the focus at farming (species has average farming). My population is 0.25 and farming production 0.09. The farming meter bar shows: nothing.
I wait a few turns until the current population reaches the target population 1.0. My farming production is now 0.38. The farming meter bar shows: nothing (still not even a sliver).

So what the change accomplished was nothing more than changing the scale:
1. Instead of always being full in the late game, the production meter bars now show nothing in the early game.
2. Instead of numbers going into the hundreds, the player now has to cope with hundredth.


I think this topic went into the details much too fast. I wish we could discuss the matter in general and as if FO didn't have any content fleshed out at all:
What variety and progression of production is needed/desired in a 4X game like FO?
What range of scale could this fit in and would this scale be presentable with a limited amount of pixels?
What side effects do these numbers have on first time players? on epic games (large galaxy)?

[eleazar]

But the growth rate is not linear is it? i.e. it takes longer to go from 1 to 2 than it does from 20 to 21, right?

Yes. Ignoring a few details, the formula presently is:

Thanks, that's a very through answer.

I notice units of population don't produce a whole unit of resource anymore, including food. Did you mean to decrease food consumption, too?

Opps, fixed.

1. To know if the goal of the changes has been reached, i need to know: What was the goal of your changes?

Primarily:
To compress production, tech and population numbers into sane bounds-- avoiding pointlessly huge numbers. This allows graphs to be informative all through the game.

Secondarily:

• to simplify population-effecting techs
  to make any population bonus relevant through out the game
  to fit production on a 100 point graph (not yet complete)

2. Are you still planning to recalibrate the production multiplicators (what you estimated as ~8.5) or should we test this as a finished change?

Yeah, i haven't really messed with those yet, but i think-- at least for some resources it will be fairly close.

My population is 0.25 and farming production 0.09. The farming meter bar shows: nothing.
I wait a few turns until the current population reaches the target population 1.0. My farming production is now 0.38. The farming meter bar shows: nothing (still not even a sliver).

The way the meter displays fractions should probably be tweaked.

I think this topic went into the details much too fast. I wish we could discuss the matter in general and as if FO didn't have any content fleshed out at all:

It's not uncommon for people, especially newcomers, to want to go back to ground zero. I've called for the same thing myself. But if we're always revisiting/throwing out old decisions, we wouldn't be moving forward. Unless there is an obvious problem we usually build on the past, instead of rebuilding it.


EDIT: As of Revision 4768.
What you should have now is similarly useful production with 1/4th the population. Everything should work, and i think you'll find the game generally more comprehensible, with fewer zeros.

Remaining issues:
* Population graph goes to 100, wasting 75% of the space.
* Very small numbers may not show on graphs
* Production boosters have not been recalibrated (should be relatively close)
* Growth rate hasn't been tweaked, (should be pretty similar)

[Sloth]

1. To know if the goal of the changes has been reached, i need to know: What was the goal of your changes?

Primarily:
To compress production, tech and population numbers into sane bounds-- avoiding pointlessly huge numbers.

Now the numbers range from 0.09 to 100. This is basically the same as 1 to 1000.

My population is 0.25 and farming production 0.09. The farming meter bar shows: nothing.
I wait a few turns until the current population reaches the target population 1.0. My farming production is now 0.38. The farming meter bar shows: nothing (still not even a sliver).

The way the meter displays fractions should probably be tweaked.

This is not a matter of fractions. You simply can't show numbers ranging from 0.09 to 100 with only 100 pixels.

What side effects do these numbers have on first time players?

To showcase what i mean here, i will go into the details. A first time player who played the game with the old numbers could figure out some of the game mechanics just by looking at the numbers:

Before:
A new colony on an adequate planet:
Turn 1: population 1.00, farming production 1.50, food consumption of 1.00.
Turn 2: population 1.00, farming production 1.50, food consumption of 1.00.
Turn 3: population 1.01, farming production 1.52, food consumption of 1.01.
Turn 4: population 1.03, farming production 1.54, food consumption of 1.03.
Turn 5: population 1.05, farming production 1.57, food consumption of 1.05.
Turn 6: population 1.07, farming production 1.61, food consumption of 1.07.
...
It's easy for the player to confirm the proportionality.

After the change
A new colony on an adequate planet:
Turn 1: population 0.25, farming production 0.09, food consumption of 0.06.
Turn 2: population 0.25, farming production 0.09, food consumption of 0.06.
Turn 3: population 0.26, farming production 0.09, food consumption of 0.06.
Turn 4: population 0.26, farming production 0.10, food consumption of 0.07.
Turn 5: population 0.27, farming production 0.10, food consumption of 0.07.
Turn 6: population 0.28, farming production 0.10, food consumption of 0.07.
...
I highly doubt any player can or will try to figure out the underlying mechanics now.

Everything should work, and i think you'll find the game generally more comprehensible, with fewer zeros.

My example should show that this is not the case.

[eleazar]

My population is 0.25 and farming production 0.09. The farming meter bar shows: nothing.
I wait a few turns until the current population reaches the target population 1.0. My farming production is now 0.38. The farming meter bar shows: nothing (still not even a sliver).

The way the meter displays fractions should probably be tweaked.

This is not a matter of fractions. You simply can't show numbers ranging from 0.09 to 100 with only 100 pixels.

It's really starting to sound like you have an axe to grind.
It's 200+ pix wide. And those 200 pixels aren't any better at showing numbers between 1 and 1600. There's no new problem with the graph -- i've just made the scale issues more obvious at the beginning than the end.
It could easily be tweaked to show more numbers < .5 as a 1 pixel bar for instance.

What side effects do these numbers have on first time players?
To showcase what i mean here, i will go into the details. A first time player who played the game with the old numbers could figure out some of the game mechanics just by looking at the numbers:
...
I highly doubt any player can or will try to figure out the underlying mechanics now.

It was not my design goal to make the game mechanics derivable from viewing very low population planets where rounding off probably significantly effects the results. If somebody really wanted to see how food consumption related to population they might look at their homeworld. Pop: 6, FoodConsumption:1.5 makes it pretty clear. I also expect Food Consumption to be revised soonish to be even clearer.

Everything should work, and i think you'll find the game generally more comprehensible, with fewer zeros.

My example should show that this is not the case.

An obscure use-case does not prove a general negative.

[Bigjoe5]

This is not a matter of fractions. You simply can't show numbers ranging from 0.09 to 100 with only 100 pixels.

It's really starting to sound like you have an axe to grind.

More like, it sounds like he doesn't think the change accomplished much except changing the position of the zeros, and the part of the game in which they show up, and while I don't object to trying some new numbers out, I can see why it looks like you jumped in without changing into your bathing suit first.

[eleazar]

I hate to throw another variable into the mix of all the stuff we're dealing with ATM, but now that food isn't a limited resource, there's no big reason we can't have larger population numbers again -- assuming that the rate of production is also adjusted to accommodate larger population numbers.

It wouldn't bother me much to have an average rate of production of 0.2 instead of 0.5-- which keeping everything proportionate would allow max populations of ~60. Just an example.

Previously the problem with small fractional production rates was that food consumption would have to be an even tinier fraction of the production rate.

[Bigjoe5]

Cutting the average rate of production to 0.5 was already a compromise... 0.2 might make the production from a single unit of population seem insignificant. On the other hand, it could help to avoid having target meters with values going to two decimal places, since currently, bad species produce 0.25 of a particular resource.

Either way, I won't be particularly bothered.

Edit: It just occurred to me that having higher population means having a higher population boost from each source, meaning having a higher range of potential population boosts from Growth. Unless you want to have the population boosts quantized by 3s or something instead of by 1s as they are now, that means a lot more effectsgroups that need to be added, which could be annoying.

[Geoff the Medio]

It wouldn't bother me much to have an average rate of production of 0.2 instead of 0.5-- which keeping everything proportionate would allow max populations of ~60.

Why not 1.0 instead of 0.2? The costs of things in PP and RP can be adjusted again, and avoiding fractions as much as is reasonable seems preferable.

[Bigjoe5]

It wouldn't bother me much to have an average rate of production of 0.2 instead of 0.5-- which keeping everything proportionate would allow max populations of ~60.

Why not 1.0 instead of 0.2? The costs of things in PP and RP can be adjusted again, and avoiding fractions as much as is reasonable seems preferable.

Because then meters would go to ~500 instead of 100.

Which isn't a problem, if we want the visible portion of the meter graphic to go to 500.

[eleazar]

It wouldn't bother me much to have an average rate of production of 0.2 instead of 0.5-- which keeping everything proportionate would allow max populations of ~60.

Why not 1.0 instead of 0.2? The costs of things in PP and RP can be adjusted again, and avoiding fractions as much as is reasonable seems preferable.

Because then meters would go to ~500 instead of 100.

Avoiding fractions is desirable, but not the only desirable thing.

Keeping a lower number of digits in production/research costs is also desirable.
I though you considered capping meters at 100 very desirable.

Anyway, if average base production is 1, then a species with sub-average production (and probably some above-average picks) will contain a fraction.

[eleazar]

I has occurred to me that a "soft cap" for production might be more graceful, and be less restrictive on the content.

In short, if a planet produces more than 100 resources, the excess is converted directly into Trade. Since a planet not focused on trade would normally produce little or no trade, we would have a margin of ~100 to play with. So a normal teched up planet could produce around 100 resources per turn. Planets with the perfect specials & species could theoretically go to 100 +100.

For this to be worth while, trade would have to be something that you always wanted more of.

We'd still have to moderate trade production so it didn't surpass 100.


This of course makes more sense if we have Trade instead of or in addition too Influence

[Zireael]

Like the idea.

[Bigjoe5]

I'm not really sure how I feel about that, but I can't come up with any strong objection at the moment.

[em3]

This seems kind of arbitrary, for every planet type and size, throughout the galactic history, to have the cap the same. It feels wrong, but I can't think of an alternative.

---

How about setting secondary focuses for planets (surplus is directed towards the secondary focus) with the secondary foci other than "trade" unlock-able by technologies?

[Zireael]

A return to secondary foci? Love the idea!!!