I think that having to completely vacate a planet in order to repopulate it with another species is going to end up being a total pain, in terms of potential micromanagement for the player, unintuitive game design (what, we have to move everyone out first?), and possibly even coding (a special case where you have a completely empty yet fully developed planet). And this is something that is potentially going to crop up a lot, for example when taking over another empire's planets, you might not want their populations on the planets they are on.Sapphire Wyvern wrote:If the uplifted races are to actually have much impact on the game, it would imply that the uplift's racial traits probably need to be different to your own racial traits. Otherwise they're just bonus population.
Therefore, do we need to rethink the "one population type per planet" rule? Allowing mixed population also permits us a certain amount of flexibility in handling conquered populations, but introduces an unattractive layer of complexity to managing planetary populations (eg shuffling your farming specialists to farming worlds, etc) that we have been trying to avoid.
Personally i think that the '1 species per planet' rule could be relaxed slightly. Instead of having a hard coded limit of 1 species per planet (which would make it abnormally difficult and tedious to do things like change which species you want on a planet), have the player designate one species, and have the population gradually shift over time until the planet is entirely full of the designated species.
So a planet could have more than one species on it at a time, but this would only be a transitionary state towards a monoculture. Since it is only a transitionary state, dont bother with prioritising which species perform which roles etc, just have them perform jobs in equal proportions, i.e. dont bother to assign them based on their strengths and weaknesses.
Planet X has 75% klackons, 25% psilons
Planet economy is 75% industry, 25% research
Population breakdown:
56% klackons working in industry
19% klackons working in research
19% psilons working in industry
6% psilons working in research
Note that this would require a fairly complex migratory model, but this is not necessarily something which would require player intervention. Possibly the player could set government policies like 'assisted relocation' which would increase the rate at which population moved from planet to planet, but cost the empire money, depending on how much movement was going on.