Planet advantages/disadvantages

For what's not in 'Top Priority Game Design'. Post your ideas, visions, suggestions for the game, rules, modifications, etc.

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marhawkman
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#16 Post by marhawkman »

I agree with Geoff's rescale idea. MoO2 had planet sizes in neat increments from 4-30 or so. However Populations went from 1 to 30,000(or so).
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eleazar
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#17 Post by eleazar »

Geoff the Medio wrote:perhaps we should rescale the population numbers? The displayed and player-visible population could be always 10 or 100 times the population meter value of a planet. So my 0.01 threshold would become a threshold of 1. A planet could have up to 1000 or 10000 population (though in practice would have 300 or 3000 respectively at the start of the game....)
Um, how does adding zeros make things better?

If you simply want to equate a "million" or "billion" with 1 population unit, that really wouldn't hold up well across species. A full planet of ant-like aliens would have thousands of times more individuals than an equally full planet of elephantoids. For sanity the same number should be in the primary display. But the number shouldn't be considered a headcount, but some sort of indicator of theoretical maximum planet usage. That sounds kinda awkward, but i've never heard that a city population of 1—21 (or whatever) was ever a problem with the Civs. The number is more abstract, but it's also much smaller and therefore easier to compare and comprehend.

But for flavor, perhaps in the individual planetary info screen, i think it would be good like MoO and Civ to have a head-count number that might scale exponentially relative to the population meter, and be calculated differently for different species.

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Geoff the Medio
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#18 Post by Geoff the Medio »

eleazar wrote:Um, how does adding zeros make things better?
As you said,
eleazar wrote:Because whole numbers are obvious, intuitive, discreet units of population.
and because at a scale of 1-30, the smallest-steps are too large. Having 1-3000 or 1-300 allows a whole number step of 1 to be small enough for gameplay and setting-plausibility purposes.
If you simply want to equate a "million" or "billion" with 1 population unit, that really wouldn't hold up well across species.
There's obviously a lot of hand-waving going on here for usability purposes, but the assumption would be than these are millions or billions of human-equivalent workforce. That might mean trillions of ants are as productive as billions of humanoids, and both could be displayed to the player as "1000" population units.

There could also be a fun-facts screen somewhere that shows how many individual ants or humans exist in an empire, but this number would probably have no gameplay purpose.
i've never heard that a city population of 1—21 (or whatever) was ever a problem with the Civs.
Civ cities (at least in Civ I, I'm not sure about the later games) treated the first population point at 10000 people, the second as 20000 (for population 2 = 30000 people), the third, 30000 (for 60000 people total), etc.
But for flavor, perhaps in the individual planetary info screen, i think it would be good like MoO and Civ to have a head-count number that might scale exponentially relative to the population meter, and be calculated differently for different species.
I'm not sure what you mean by "scale exponentially". Could you explain?

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eleazar
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#19 Post by eleazar »

Geoff the Medio wrote:
eleazar wrote:But for flavor, perhaps in the individual planetary info screen, i think it would be good like MoO and Civ to have a head-count number that might scale exponentially relative to the population meter, and be calculated differently for different species.
I'm not sure what you mean by "scale exponentially". Could you explain?
By "scale exponentially" i mean something that works similarly to this:
Geoff the Medio wrote:Civ cities ... treated the first population point at 10000 people, the second as 20000 (for population 2 = 30000 people), the third, 30000 (for 60000 people total), etc.
Geoff the Medio wrote:
eleazar wrote:Um, how does adding zeros make things better?
As you said,
eleazar wrote:Because whole numbers are obvious, intuitive, discreet units of population.
and because at a scale of 1-30, the smallest-steps are too large. Having 1-3000 or 1-300 allows a whole number step of 1 to be small enough for gameplay and setting-plausibility purposes.
I assume having our fun-facts/flavor populations number takes care of "setting-plausability" problems. How does adding zeros help gameplay?
eleazar wrote:If you simply want to equate a "million" or "billion" with 1 population unit, that really wouldn't hold up well across species.
There's obviously a lot of hand-waving going on here for usability purposes, but the assumption would be than these are millions or billions of human-equivalent workforce. That might mean trillions of ants are as productive as billions of humanoids, and both could be displayed to the player as "1000" population units.[/quote]
It's a particular type of handwavium with a long and hallowed gaming history. Then we essentially agree on this point, except i still don't see the point of maxing at a thousand rather than a hundred.

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Geoff the Medio
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#20 Post by Geoff the Medio »

eleazar wrote:By "scale exponentially" i mean something that works similarly to this:
Geoff the Medio wrote:Civ cities ... treated the first population point at 10000 people, the second as 20000 (for population 2 = 30000 people), the third, 30000 (for 60000 people total), etc.
Why would we want to do this? I never really understood in Civ, if 30000 people can work 3 squares (2 pop units + city square), why can 60000 people only work 4 squares (3 pop units + city square).

If we want to model decreasing population use efficiency with increasing numbers, that is: 10000 of 10000 people work, but only 20000 of 30000 work, or 40000 of 80000, etc. Then I think we'd be better off representing that as penalties to meters on high population worlds. Whatever the scaling factor, things are more consistent and understandable if the population number is actually proportional to number of workers and number of individual beings...
Geoff the Medio wrote:As you said,
eleazar wrote:Because whole numbers are obvious, intuitive, discreet units of population.
and because at a scale of 1-30, the smallest-steps are too large. Having 1-3000 or 1-300 allows a whole number step of 1 to be small enough for gameplay and setting-plausibility purposes.
I assume having our fun-facts/flavor populations number takes care of "setting-plausability" problems. How does adding zeros help gameplay?
The fun-facts/flavour would be so that planet populations are reasonable for different races. It wouldn't fix colony ships however... In that if we say that 30 population is equal to 12 billion humans, then a colony ship carrying 1 point of population will have 400 million people on it. That's not plausible. Conversely, if we have 30000 population points on a planet, represeting 12 billion people, a colony ship carrying 1 point of population will have 400 thousand people on it. Still quite a lot, but significantly more plausible.

In gameplay terms, you (eleazar) want to make "1" population the minimum allowed on a viable colony, but this doesn't really reflect the practical reality of the situation, in which less than "1" unit of population is still a viable colony that can grow in a reasonable amount of time to a large and significantly productive colony. However, if we lower the number of people that "1" population unit represets, "1" unit might actually be closer to the minimum viable number of colonist to qualify as a usefully colonized planet, and less than "1" might be a more reasonable threshold at which to declare the colony starved to death or otherwise depopulated.

Also, in the context of this style of game, I think 3% to 10% of a developed colony's population is too much to be the smallest unit the player can manipulate. By making "1" unit represent a smaller amount of production capacity / growth potential, this problem is avoided.

Combining both the above, if we make "1" unit of population actually less than what's practical for a viable useful colony, so that really you'd need more like 50 colonists to have a colony that's capable of growing into something useful in a reasonable amount of time, we make it possible for the player ot have some choice about how many colonists to send... They can be agressive and send 100, or cautious and only risk 10 or so, but end up waiting longer for growth to compensate. (Though perhaps this isn't an interesting or worthwhile choice to include, and we'd be fine with a smaller range of possible colony ship sizes with variation on the order of 1 to 3 instead of 1 to 100...)

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eleazar
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#21 Post by eleazar »

Geoff the Medio wrote:
eleazar wrote:By "scale exponentially" i mean something that works similarly to this:
Geoff the Medio wrote:Civ cities ... treated the first population point at 10000 people, the second as 20000 (for population 2 = 30000 people), the third, 30000 (for 60000 people total), etc.
Why would we want to do this? I never really understood in Civ, if 30000 people can work 3 squares (2 pop units + city square), why can 60000 people only work 4 squares (3 pop units + city square).
Presumably an ever increasing percentage of the population is tied up maintaining the population.

But the point here is the gameplay. If a full size Civ city actually had 100 (or more) individual population units for you to assign to various tasks, the end-game would descend into a micromanagement nether-world.

In FO and Civ it's much more important that "population units" are manageable by the player than that they consistently correspond to a realistic head-count. Informing the player how many individual live on a planet is not necessary or important for gameplay. It's merely an embellishment.


Now, let's assume things stay as they are: i.e. the player will never informed how many individuals are on a planet, or how many people 1 pop-unit represents.
Do you still have a reason to make the max population displayed as 1,000, or 10,000?

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Geoff the Medio
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#22 Post by Geoff the Medio »

eleazar wrote:If a full size Civ city actually had 100 (or more) individual population units for you to assign to various tasks, the end-game would descend into a micromanagement nether-world.
Yes, but so what? FO planets are not managed like Civ cities. In Civ, (roughly) each citizen needs a job assigned. In FO, you set two focus choices, regardless of population or how population is counted.
eleazar wrote:Now, let's assume things stay as they are: i.e. the player will never informed how many individuals are on a planet, or how many people 1 pop-unit represents.
Do you still have a reason to make the max population displayed as 1,000, or 10,000?
Yes... Did you read more than the first paragraph of my previous post?

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#23 Post by SowerCleaver »

This is a related idea but not for this version of FO.

What would determine the number of votes you have for the galactic senate? Possible choices are:

1) total # of "real" number of individuals shown in the fun-facts page
2) total abstract number of actual pop points
3) total max pop points, regardless of actual occupancy

1) has the problem of ants overpowering elephantoids in any setting. 2) is the MoO way, but this just favors whoever's the most fertile - not really realistic or fund. 3) is close to what I think, but I believe the max pop point is also variable per race occupying the relevant planet - thus it has the same problem as 2).

On the other hand, I think the vote numbers should not be calculated by a complex formula involving weighting (unlike your overall score, which will presumably be based on such formula). You should be able to make conscious decisions to increase your voting power, not worrying one effort might counteract another. I therefore propose the following:

Some measure of the quality of the real estate you own (planet size multiplied by mineral richness?)

My rational is: Planets are scarce commodity in the universe and are valuable. The fact that you are controlling such properties entitles you to vote proportionally. However, whether you want to populate a planet you own or just make it a huge mining base is your decision to make - therefore pop is not recognized as your voting power. This also seems more realistic since the more powerful one empire is, I would think that empire would control more planets.

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#24 Post by zobo »

Here's just a suggestion: a vote based on planetary influence.

A race's homeworld is 10 votes.

A colony world is 1 vote.

A developed world 3 votes. Developed would have several different criteria, one for each specialty.

Perhaps some specials should give an extra vote or so.

A homeworld special vote power might be lost at conquest.

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#25 Post by eleazar »

start a new topic if you wish to discuss voting for a galactic council that (as far as i know) isn't currently planned to be part of the game.

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#26 Post by eleazar »

Back to the topic of the bulk of this thread, "what does the population units measure?"

I ran across this thread while looking for something else. While much of it is moot now, the basic idea of measuring population by counting cities is a good one.
It feels about right for a planet to support 20-30 megalopolis. But it's simpler to call them cities; an arbitrary amount of citizens required to do a certain amount of work. The actual head-count population may vary for different races. (assuming they even have heads) This word could vary according to race for flavor. Klackons might have "hives", Tree-people might have "gardens", Flying-things might have "aeries".

It just sounds a lot better to say:
• "Arcturus Prime has 7 cities", than
• "Arcturus Prime has a population of 7", or "has 7 population units."

In some ways it could be seen as an additional layer of abstraction, but it makes things more tangible, giving the number something concrete to refer to.

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#27 Post by Geoff the Medio »

eleazar wrote:It feels about right for a planet to support 20-30 megalopolis.
That'd be megalopoles, wouldn't it? Thesis -> Theses...
But it's simpler to call them cities; an arbitrary amount of citizens required to do a certain amount of work. The actual head-count population may vary for different races. (assuming they even have heads) This word could vary according to race for flavor. Klackons might have "hives", Tree-people might have "gardens", Flying-things might have "aeries".
Megalopoles might be a reasonably-sized unit, but I'm wary that using that unit, "Arcturus Prime has 7 cities", implies that planets are always colonized one megalopolis at a time...

If the population is 1 megalopolis, then is all the population cencentrated into one conurbanation, or are they spread about the planet in various smaller concentrations with sparsely populated, but not lifeless, regions in between? If it's 1.5 megalopoles, then is there one fully built city and another half-built city?

Equally (or more) troubling is that this seems to conflate the concepts of population and infrastructure level. One could have a planet with a billion inhabitants spread out and living in pre-industrial settlements, or one could have a megalopolis of one billion, with all the associated infrastructure this implies. The resource output of these two socieities would likely be quite different...

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#28 Post by marhawkman »

I prefer using the actual Population as the number. Something like a count of cities is way too artificial. Unless done as a racial trait.

As for my favorite ways population is handled: Stars and SE. In Stars Pop can be anywhere from 100 to 3,300,000.(max population of planet that is)

In SE4 it's from 1M(illion) to 64B(illion). SE4 doesn't have a continuum of sizes though.
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#29 Post by eleazar »

Geoff the Medio wrote:
eleazar wrote:But it's simpler to call them cities; an arbitrary amount of citizens required to do a certain amount of work. The actual head-count population may vary for different races. (assuming they even have heads)...
Megalopoles might be a reasonably-sized unit, but I'm wary that using that unit, "Arcturus Prime has 7 cities", implies that planets are always colonized one megalopolis at a time...

If the population is 1 megalopolis, then is all the population cencentrated into one conurbanation, or are they spread about the planet in various smaller concentrations with sparsely populated, but not lifeless, regions in between? If it's 1.5 megalopoles, then is there one fully built city and another half-built city?
I don't believe it really matters. I guess you are thinking too hard about it. In FO you don't deal with territory smaller than a planet. In the real world, the idea "city," itself, is a gross simplification and abstraction of population distributions and densities. However, the player may imagine a single giant city on a newfound world, or multiple smaller settlements that are equivalent to a megalopolis— it does not influence gameplay.
Geoff the Medio wrote:Equally (or more) troubling is that this seems to conflate the concepts of population and infrastructure level. One could have a planet with a billion inhabitants spread out and living in pre-industrial settlements, or one could have a megalopolis of one billion, with all the associated infrastructure this implies. The resource output of these two socieities would likely be quite different...
I may have given that impression, but I'm not proposing to alter the interaction between infrastructure and population.
I don't believe megalopolis implies any particular tech level. From a non-anthropomorphic standpoint, it could be argued that ants and termites have had them for ages.
marhawkman wrote:I prefer using the actual Population as the number. Something like a count of cities is way too artificial. Unless done as a racial trait.

As for my favorite ways population is handled: Stars and SE. In Stars Pop can be anywhere from 100 to 3,300,000.(max population of planet that is)

In SE4 it's from 1M(illion) to 64B(illion). SE4 doesn't have a continuum of sizes though.
Sorry, v.3 req make it pretty clear that population (like about everything else) will primarily be measured by a meter # between 1 and 100. An simplification i rather support.

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#30 Post by marhawkman »

eleazar wrote:make it pretty clear that population (like about everything else) will primarily be measured by a meter # between 1 and 100. An simplification i rather support.
Um that's the growth. That doesan't mention the actual pop itself. Other than showing 35 as the size of a gaia world.
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