Removing Food?

[MikkoM]

...and stockpiling quirks with the current blockading system would also mostly disappear.

After quickly reading this thread through, it seems that there must be some very serious problems with the stockpiling and blockade systems, as the empire wide food distribution system is suggested to be replaced by some local bonus giving growth system. At least currently it is difficult for me to understand why having some area limited growth bonuses would produce and easier system than the empire wide food distribution system currently is?

This eliminates the need for the player to decide how to allocated a limited resource, or to make up some rather arbitrary rules about how the distribution is ordered.

Would making arbitary rules for food be really that bad? Since if you don`t grow enough food the rightful punishment is starvation of your worlds.

[Geoff the Medio]

...there must be some very serious problems with the stockpiling and blockade systems, as the empire wide food distribution system...

The main problem with stockpiling is that it happens only in one location, and planets may not have access to the stockpile if they are not connected to it. If game mechanics are designed and built, and players develop an expectation that there is a stockpile, but many planets don't have them, weird and/or illogical things can happen, and trying to make sense of the empire summary statistics is more difficult. Having a stockpile also makes players likely to wonder why they can't stockpile on a particular system that is likely to need a stockpile soon, perhaps due to a blockade, but must instead put all the stockpile at a central location. Keeping track and displaying stockpiles at every planet is even more impractical, however.

At least currently it is difficult for me to understand why having some area limited growth bonuses would produce and easier system than the empire wide food distribution system currently is?

As discussed above, the main advantages for removing a distribution system are the lack of decisions about how to distribute, and lack of changes at one location altering available food at far removed locations. Lack of a single "food" type resource also makes more sense for different species, which won't sensibly use a single type of material for food-type purposes. Also, it is confusing to have a reported empire surplus of food, but have planets starving nonetheless due to local distribution issues.

Would making arbitary rules for food be really that bad? Since if you don`t grow enough food the rightful punishment is starvation of your worlds.

I'm not sure what the point of your second sentence is; yes, food is presently needed to stop starvation. What does that have to with whether arbitrary rules are bad?

Regardless, IMO arbitrary rules - or more descriptively, "algorithms" - are bad because they create something the player will want to control, but can't. Essentially, micromanagement to distribute food is required, but not allowed. For example, if there is limited excess food, it is automatically distributed to the planets, which are not necessarily where the player wants to spend it. Having a non-limited-resource system, there is no automatic distribution algorithm needed for where to allocate the available food; instead, everywhere in range of a health-boost source gets the boost.

[Dart00_Tech]

Maybe instead of "growth" we could call it "Economy"?

[Geoff the Medio]

Maybe instead of "growth" we could call it "Economy"?

The name isn't the main issue, however that one is particularly bad, as it would be confusing with the existing "trade" resource and does not suggest growth or population increases.

[eleazar]

Geoff:
your short-distance food supply idea doesn't sound too hard to implement. Why don't you make a prototype?
Seems like a more definite way to resolve the question of weather it would be annoying and micromanagy in practice or not.

Anyway, i like the idea of moving to a system were "food" is not stockpiled, though there are many other possible non-stockpiling "food/growth" systems.

[Geoff the Medio]

I'm in the midst of sort-of following eleazar's suggestion, and trying out removing food and health and instead just having target and current population.

It should be sufficient to just have different sizes of modifiers on target population. That is, there probably isn't need for a distinction between high health / high growth rate, and high target population. Being a high population or a low population species is a simple and meaningful distinction for players, and also impacts actual growth rate due to the dependence of growth on target population.

I'm planning that the effectiveness of a species at farming or otherwise producing target population boosts will work somewhat differently that the existing effectsgroups. The idea is to have one farming planet provide a boost to target population for multiple nearby planets, with the size of the boost depending on the effectiveness of the farmers. A good farming planet could give big boosts to the target population of several other planets.

Some unresolved details are:
- Do different species get different size boosts from other planets producing population boosts? That is, is there a "high population" species that gets twice as large a bonus as an average population species elsewhere producing growth bonuses? This could be implemented with tags, with the different bonuses being selected in the effectsgroup of the species that's producing them, rather than the present system where each species gets different effectsgroups that act only on its own planets.
- How to handle multiple sources of population boost acting on one planet? Probably letting unlimited population boosts stack is imbalanced, so only the largest boost a given planet can get should count. There's presently no easy way to do this, as the stacking group mechanism doesn't let the scripting chose a particular bonus to apply, but instead just uses the first one to be evaluated. Then again, maybe unlimited stacking would be OK, if the range is limited? This would probably make eleazar's attempts at scaling meters to a specific range impractical / impossible, though...

[eleazar]

To be clear, i recommended that Geoff prototype it because i think range-based population boosts are a bad idea-- but that building it would more efficiently resolve the question than sitting around writing long posts. Though perhaps what he had in mind was more wide-ranging than i realized.

EDIT:

That is, there probably isn't need for a distinction between high health / high growth rate, and high target population. Being a high population or a low population species is a simple and meaningful distinction for players

No objection.

The idea is to have one farming planet provide a boost to target population

How is that different from what techs, buildings and specials do for population? The following makes it sound like you are throwing everything out that previously effected population...

Do different species get different size boosts from other planets producing population boosts? That is, is there a "high population" species that gets twice as large a bonus as an average population species elsewhere producing growth bonuses?

How to handle multiple sources of population boost acting on one planet? Probably letting unlimited population boosts stack is imbalanced, so only the largest boost a given planet can get should count.

Or you put a hard cap on population (depending on size, habitability etc.) so excess beyond a certain point is ignored.

[Sloth]

It should be sufficient to just have different sizes of modifiers on target population. That is, there probably isn't need for a distinction between high health / high growth rate, and high target population. Being a high population or a low population species is a simple and meaningful distinction for players, and also impacts actual growth rate due to the dependence of growth on target population.

I see two problems with just having high/low population as a species trait:

1. Gameplay:
A high population species will produce more of everything in all situations of the game. So Population+1 more or less equals Mining+1, Production+1 and Research+1. So it doesn't really help to diversify species. Having Population Growth as a trait of species on the other hand will favor certain strategies (i.e. not turtling into the home system, but expand aggressively).

2. Flavor:
What does it mean for a species to have a high population? It can't be about numbers to fit onto a planet. So maybe Biomass? Productivity (which the mechanics reflect)? Population Growth is easy to explain for a species.

How to handle multiple sources of population boost acting on one planet? Probably letting unlimited population boosts stack is imbalanced, so only the largest boost a given planet can get should count.

Or you put a hard cap on population (depending on size, habitability etc.) so excess beyond a certain point is ignored.

I second this.
I think this can be explained quite well:
Without food the Planet can have a population of X,
with food the Planet can have a population of Y.

Maybe Y can always be 2*X or something.

[Geoff the Medio]

The idea is to have one farming planet provide a boost to target population

How is that different from what techs, buildings and specials do for population?

You left out the rest of that sentence and the next one:

The idea is to have one farming planet provide a boost to target population for multiple nearby planets, with the size of the boost depending on the effectiveness of the farmers. A good farming planet could give big boosts to the target population of several other planets.

The current / old system has farming planets that produce food, which gets distributed around to planets to support their population. Lack of this support causes starvation.

The new system has farming planets (or similar) which provide a boost to population capacity of nearby planets. Lack of this boost just means those other planets have their original population capacity; there is no "starvation" (except on planets that have zero capacity on their own) and most planets are basically self-sufficient in "food".

Mostly by convention, techs generally act without with positional dependence like affecting only "nearby planets". Specials generally act only on their own planet, giving a local boost to some stat, possibly including population. Buildings do a variety of things, and I suspect some buildings could interact with the new farming planets to enhance their effect, or could be included in the "or similar" in brackets above.

In terms of how the scripting is set up, and the direct impact, there's not much difference between species, specials, techs, or buildings that can each apply a modifier to population. The distinctions arise from what the player does to get the modifiers, though. For techs, they are researched. For buildings, they are produced. For specials, they are just there, or need to be colonized or captured to be accessible. For species / farming boosts to other planets population, things work mostly like farming used to: you pick a good farming planet, and tell it to farm, and then other planets get a benefit.

The difference now is that the benefit that other planets get is much simpler and avoids many quirks (eg. stockpiles) and annoyances (eg. very unfun "starvation") that arise from food.

I also like that with the new system, it's useful to have more and better farming planets throughout the game. With a food resource system, there's a reduction in its importance and utility through the game... Any more food than necessary to support the population is useless, and as food resource output per planet increases, the need for farming planets would decrease, and additional boosts to farming are less valuable. With the new system, more population should always be useful, and with limited range of effect, additional planets will need to be dedicated to population support (farmings, health boosting, etc.) as the empire expands.

The following makes it sound like you are throwing everything out that previously effected population...

I actually think I made more things affect population directly, because I removed farming and health as distinct meters which were really indirect modifiers of population.

A high population species will produce more of everything in all situations of the game.

Not necessarily, as a) some things give fixed bonuses that don't depend on anything and b) infrastructure may take more of a role as an alternative to population.

What does it mean for a species to have a high population? It can't be about numbers to fit onto a planet.

Higher target population means that for a variety of reasons (which will depend on the bit of content that boosts the target population), more of that species in some not-very-clearly defined sense is present on a planet. That means that things that depend on population do more of whatever they do on or from those planets. What exactly the population number means is likely kept vague intentionally, to avoid issues of comparing "population" numbers of vastly different species. Regardless of the story-interpretation though, the target number indicates the point where the rate of loss equals the rate of birth (or equivalent for that species). By keeping things a bit vague, it's reasonable to have a variety of plausible-sounding things influence what that target population is, including "farming", "health", or "housing" type content.

[...]Population Growth is easy to explain...

Not any more so than target population as the effective capacity of the planet. It's possibly easier to understand why it's useful to have planets get +2 population capacity on them, and how that will impact the game, than it is to understand why getting +5 to a more-obscure growth rate statistic is useful.

[eleazar]

The new system has farming planets (or similar) which provide a boost to population capacity of nearby planets. Lack of this boost just means those other planets have their original population capacity

Ok, so food production stacks with any other population bonus.

The difference now is that the benefit that other planets get is much simpler and avoids many quirks (eg. stockpiles) and annoyances (eg. very unfun "starvation") that arise from food.

Yeah, as i've said before i agree with those ends. There are IMHO other, better ways to achieve them, that don't involve clicking on every planet to try to figure out what's going on.

With the new system, more population should always be useful...

So there's no predictable limit to population. Which means there's no predictable limit to anything population based. Pretty much destroys the point and benefits of what i've been doing with Recalibrating Population & Production.

A high population species will produce more of everything in all situations of the game.

It is a powerful pick, but don't forget you will have to pay for it. When all is balanced, presumably the other picks you could buy instead will be equally powerful.

Though different population levels by species is something i wouldn't be heartbroken to loose if it didn't work out.

[Geoff the Medio]

With the new system, more population should always be useful...

So there's no predictable limit to population.

No and yes.

There need to be limits, including some of:
* Planets giving population-dependent boosts to other planets' population don't receive population-dependent boosts to their own population. This prevents feedback loops and resulting uncapped exponential growth.
* Using population independent boosts. Instead of SetTargetPopulation Value + Source.Population * 0.5, just use SetTargetPopulation Value + 3 (or whatever), independent of source population.
* Diminishing returns, perhaps something like the boost to a planet's target population is proportional to the difference between the source and target populations. This would probably create some unstable target populations, though, so probably wouldn't work well.
* Hard cap on total boost to population on a planet, enforced by game itself. I'd like to avoid this as it's quite clunky and makes many later-game bonuses useless, gets away from the single target population number and effectively returns to a separate max population number. This also shouldn't be necessary if other limits are used and the available bonuses are sized properly, much like how the lists of all possible bonuses were laid out in recent threads.
* Stacking limits such that only a single bonus is applied to any planet, which is the largest of available bonuses. I'd like to have a mechanism to do this kind of stacking limits anyway, so order of application doesn't determine which effect acts on an object.
* Put the population boost to a planet in its own species' effectsgroups, rather than on other planets. This would allow just a single boost source to be selected, probably with a sorting condition to pick the biggest one. This would also enable the selection of bonuses that are of a suitable type for the planet being boosted (eg. need farming for organics, "computer support" stuff for computerize species, mining for lithovores, etc.). This would make tailoring the total boosts to a planet easier, probably without the sorted / biggest available stacking limit stuff.
Edit: * Maybe there doesn't need to be a "farming"-related or similar population boost? Without a farming focus option, the set of things a planet can do, and reasons why a particular place would be good for multiple things that the player must choose between, gets rather small, particularly at the start of the game, so I'd like to assume something like farming will be workable. /Edit

Even on a single planet, as long as there are appropriate stacking controls, it will still be useful throughout the game to be getting larger boosts for your existing planets' populations, to replace the smaller boosts you already have. The total size of all the boosts on a planet can be limited, as above, but you'll still want to be increasing it during the game in order to max out your planets' populations.

Also, my point about more population boost still being useful does not apply only on a single-planet basis. Players will want more population-boosting things throughout the game, in order to boost the population of new planets that aren't in range of the older boosts. These additional boosts won't all be stacking on a single planet, giving it unlimited population, but rather will be boosting other planets.

Edit: To clarify, the main thing I'm trying to avoid is having a limited-resource-based growth boosting mechanism. A limited resource requires distribution prioritization of the resource, which IMO has major drawbacks. There can be limits on how much a single planet can be boosted, but not limits on the total boosting due to a finite supply of boost points that need to be prioritized and distributed. While having a resource of this sort may appear to eliminate the need to check individual planets, it really doesn't, as the particulars of how the resource is distributed if there is insufficient supply, or if there are impediments to its distribution (eg. blockades), mean that a single number for the whole empire doesn't adequately describe the situation on every planet. /Edit

Which means there's no predictable limit to anything population based.

There are options of how to set things up which can maintain useful and predictable population limits.

[Sloth]

* Put the population boost to a planet in its own species' effectsgroups, rather than on other planets. This would allow just a single boost source to be selected, probably with a sorting condition to pick the biggest one. This would also enable the selection of bonuses that are of a suitable type for the planet being boosted (eg. need farming for organics, "computer support" stuff for computerize species, mining for lithovores, etc.). This would make tailoring the total boosts to a planet easier, probably without the sorted / biggest available stacking limit stuff.

I like this option the most. I would even consider going one step further and not have different sized boosts. A planet is either fed (a planet with farming focus is in range) or not. No sorting algorithm would be needed. The size of the boost can still be dependent on techs and buildings with empire wide effects.

Pros:
- Max populations can be controlled easily (as before).
- The player wouldn't need to manage so many population boni, he would just try to keep most of his planets fed. Stacking population boosts through farming on the other hand would lead to brain damaging optimization problems for the player (micro managements fat older sister).

Cons:
- The producing planet cannot be better or worse at farming (only the feeding range could be controlled).

[eleazar]

I think getting rid of the food meter/graph in the sidebar was premature.

It may not mean exactly the same thing as the other meter since your changes, but food production still varies from planet to planet, and thus a bar showing different magnitudes would be useful.

Also now there's nothing to hover over and get a tooltip describing what factors lead to this planet's food "production", or whatever you want to call it.

[Geoff the Medio]

It may not mean exactly the same thing as the other meter since your changes, but food production still varies from planet to planet, and thus a bar showing different magnitudes would be useful.

Also now there's nothing to hover over and get a tooltip describing what factors lead to this planet's food "production", or whatever you want to call it.

This is a case where the technical details of what a meter is and isn't are relevant. The effect accounting stuff (list of meter changes in a tooltip) are set up to show what effects and source objects act on a meter. It's not set up to show which target objects a particular source object is acting on. The latter is more-or-less the information you want, and can probably be displayed, and would probably be useful for other types of content as well, such as anything that has a negative affect on other objects (eg. bioterror facilities). Doing so will require some extra work, though, and likely should have a somewhat different UI representation. The meter-bar display in particular isn't really appropriate in this case, though the tooltip list of effects would be. Another always-present UI widget that provides a list of targets modified by this source object would be nice, though I'm not sure how best to set that up so that it can be used for this purpose (population boosts applied elsewhere) and other uses (bioterror, or perhaps on ship or building indicators as well). Presumably techs could use a similar list, though in that case, a list in the encyclopedia might be more appropriate.

That said you can prsently hover over planets' population icons, which will show a list of effects modifying that, including other planets set to "farming".

[eleazar]

I think you got me backwards.

I see where the tooltip over population identifies the farming boosts (though currently not in a very informative way).

What i miss is the tooltip (and graph bar) on the planet making the food explaining how much it is making and what bonuses are being applied to it's food production. Just like it used to. This has nothing to do with where that food is going.