Crews

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iamrobk · #1 Post by **iamrobk** » Tue Oct 07, 2003 2:02 am

Here is an idea I was thinking of to help balance building large ships. Maybe each race would start with a base % that would determine the # of potential soldiers/crewmen/whatever. More warlike races would have a higher %. Humans would probably be upper-middle in tersm of %.\, for comparison. Whenever you would build a ship, a part of your population would just "disappear", since they would be sent aboard the ship. Maybe the largest ship type could use what would be 1 population point in MOO3. How we would figure out what planets these population things would come from, I have no clue, but really this would balance out large ships vs. small ships a a lot IMO, since you would take away a lot of your tax base if you build only large ships, but small ships could be balanced to be a lot weaker than large ships, however would be able to build a ton of them, though they probably wouldn't do much damage to a large ship. Any ideas on crews and whatever?

utilae · #2 Post by **utilae** » Tue Oct 07, 2003 2:19 am

Why don't we just say that the maintenance of larger ships includes the wages of all the crew.

I don't like the idea of your ships taking away your population. What if you build too many ships and your planets have no population. Could you put them back?

That Guy · #3 Post by **That Guy** » Tue Oct 07, 2003 3:06 am

How about you have a building that converts a percentage that you set of a planet's pop growth. Crews could become a resource, and if a ship is understaffed, it doesn't perform correctly. That way, you don't lose population and there would be a reason to expand to get a better crwe base.

Krikkitone · #4 Post by **Krikkitone** » Tue Oct 07, 2003 6:56 pm

Well I don't feel that crew should have an impact on population.

MAYBE you could have a crew Resource/Draft Value that depends on your population ... but then that should be changeable by means of actions of your (instituting a draft) that have their own cost.

So I think a better measure might be to compare Total 'Crew size' of your Troops and Ships to the population... and then impose penalties if the number is too high for that race (unrest because our sons+daughters/larva are overstars risking their lives...possible penalties to growthrate for the same reason.)

EntropyAvatar · #5 Post by **EntropyAvatar** » Wed Oct 08, 2003 2:51 pm

So I think a better measure might be to compare Total 'Crew size' of your Troops and Ships to the population... and then impose penalties if the number is too high for that race (unrest because our sons+daughters/larva are overstars risking their lives...possible penalties to growthrate for the same reason.)

This sounds good. Maybe some races would experience unrest if too few were in the military: "How will they learn to be real men/tylids if they don't taste battle?"

iamrobk · #6 Post by **iamrobk** » Thu Oct 09, 2003 1:13 am

Yes, but I also feel that they shouldn't count as "real" population points when calculating Industry and Research efficieny and what-not.

Ablaze · #7 Post by **Ablaze** » Thu Oct 09, 2003 3:12 am

At first I didn't like this idea much, but now that I think about it this could double as ground troops that can be used to resist a planetary invasion and attack other planets. That would make it, in my mind, a significant enough bonus to gameplay to justify the creation of the system.

It seems to me that military populations could even be traded as a resource between planets.

Impaler · #8 Post by **Impaler** » Thu Oct 09, 2003 9:29 am

The crew of a shace ship is rather insignificant, we could ignore the effect on a planets population of the loss of these few individuals.

But standing armies ARE very large and keeping a huge % of your population as a standing army is very expenseive, look at North Korea, they have something like 20% of the whole population in the army and its a HUGE drain on the economy. Each indivudual in the Army is using 2-3 times as much resorces as they would have produced in the civilian economy.

So I would propose something like this. Have a building "Barracks" that works much like the Moo2 building of the same name but now it reducec population as it makes armies. Alow the armies to be but on "stand down" which is like mothballing, the population units tied up in the army go back to work as say 3/4 normal capactiy and they slowly losse experience.

A similar but more expencive building would make "crew" that is then used in constructing ships, ships though require only a very small amount of population vs what it takes to produce a desent army. When a ship is mothballed its crew goes to work on the plant that the ship is at (you can only mothball ships at a special "mothball yard"). Again the crew work at 3/4 capactiy and slowly losse experience.

Krikkitone · #9 Post by **Krikkitone** » Thu Oct 09, 2003 4:03 pm

Impaler's idea sounds good, but I'd simplify it a bit.

Total up 'Crews' of 'ships' (I'm including armies as ships here) in active duty + 1/4 of 'Crews' of 'ships' in reserve/mothball. Reduce the 'productive population' of your whole empire (or all of your race in your empire) by that much (ie they still consume food and generate more population....)

When a 'ship' dies or takes significant damage, overall population is reduced.

'Ships' in Reserve have their experience 'drift' to a value depending on your training level... (I'd also have ships in active duty have experience 'drift' so that after a certain number of battles a 'ship' would be at max experience level)

again 'Spaceship' crews should be negligible (between 0.000001 and 0.0001 pop units) 'Army' crews should probably be more (about 0.001 for battleoids to 0.01 for Infantry)

Ablaze · #10 Post by **Ablaze** » Thu Oct 09, 2003 6:41 pm

I don't see any compelling reason to separate crew and ground troops.

Staffing a large ship could easily take 100,000 people, and I can see a late game flag ship taking 1 mil people. Admittedly that wouldn't be a large chunk out of a developed planet, maybe 1 pop unit, but it would probably be a HUGE chunk out of your standing army.

I think that standing armies on a planet should have a rate of decline, similar to what was discussed for minerals earlier. Some % of your current reserves would disappear each turn.. lets say, for simplicity, 10% in this example. Your standing army should be recruited from the main population by a military infrastructure. (Not a building.)

So if your population was 2 billion and your infrastructure recruited .05% of the population each turn then you would gain 1 million troops each turn, but 10% of them would go away.

If you happened to have no troops in the reserve then you would gain 900 thousand troops that turn.

If you had 10 million troops then your level of troops wouldn't change that turn.

If you had 999 million (somehow) then your troops would go up to 100 mil and then lose 10%. (10 mil) Leaving you with only 990 million troops the next turn.

EntropyAvatar · #11 Post by **EntropyAvatar** » Thu Oct 09, 2003 7:01 pm

I think some sort of general penalty for having a military:population ratio outside your race's desired range has all the gameplay benefits without getting into the minutiae of keeping track of small pieces of population.

Krikkitone · #12 Post by **Krikkitone** » Fri Oct 10, 2003 2:23 pm

actually that's probably better. (since I was assuming pop units to be near to a billion) there really shouldn't be any conversion between pop units and crew.

Just have 'crew units' requirement and an optimum ratio of crew units to pop units... (although Units 'on reserve' should consume fewer 'crew units' then)

(of course I still think 'armies' should require far more crew units than 'spaceships'... depending on how many there are.)

EntropyAvatar · #13 Post by **EntropyAvatar** » Fri Oct 10, 2003 2:48 pm

Krikkitone wrote:(of course I still think 'armies' should require far more crew units than 'spaceships'... depending on how many there are.)

I could see scenarios where the number of actual combat troops is very low. If each soldier is equipped like the guys in Starship Troopers (the book) then you might only need a few thousand to take down an entire planet. Of course, then there's all the support technicians, and occupation troops....

Krikkitone · #14 Post by **Krikkitone** » Fri Oct 10, 2003 3:19 pm

Well, yeah, but the guys in starship troopers I would consider almost battleoids... for the cheap interstellar dictator, there's always "one gets the rifle, one gets the bullets, when the one with the rifle gets shot, grab the rifle, one gets the rif...." where your infantry are basically not costing much more than the average per capita production. I mean essentially all they need is a space suit, a gun, and passage on a freighter.

Which is why I think you should be able to design your troops as well as your other types of ships... the amount of crew they take could be fixed. But by making them higher tech, they would be more expensive and more effective...although probably slightly less cost effective if PP were the only thing you were worried about... but more cost effective when you took crew into account.

iamrobk · #15 Post by **iamrobk** » Tue Nov 02, 2004 6:33 pm

Hmm....after reading all this, i think that having a general military population would be a good diea. They would be housed in barracks. You could start recruiting campaigns and all to help encourage more civilains to join the military. Then whenever you build a ship or want a new army, it takes X amount of soldiers away from your general military population.