Manpower as a resource

[AMF]

Manpower should be the "fourth resource" in SE5.

There has been a lot of talk about adding "money" as yet another resource to SE5. I believe this is wrong for a lot of reasons, but I do feel that we should add another, different resource: manpower.

Allow me to explain my ideas.

Building ships, weapons platforms and so forth require not only stuff (minerals, radioactives, organics), and an industrial base (shipyards) but also you need to man them with trained personnel. The amount of trained personnel available for the military is often a limiting factor, especially in outlying areas or less populated planets. This is true in reality, and should be even more acute when dealing with far-flung interstellar empires. You shouldn't be able to build twenty battleships every three months on that distant planet with only 20 million people, even if you have the industry there to do it. The people just ain't there to man the ships.

Furthermore, recruitment varies depending on popular mood
(happiness), government type (more totalitarian govts can "press-gang" more personnel, but they will be less capable problaby), facilities (academies produce more trained personnel) and other stuff.

I think that this could be implemented into SE5 simply as an
additional resource that each planet produces, but which is not stored, and varies based on the above ideas.

A wide variety of ideas come to mind about how this could make a nifty addition, with little added hassles.

However, I beleive that we can go even one small step further and make it even neater in the following way. With this idea we could address the fact that manpower also varies by skill - the more you build, the more skilled manpower you use up, the less skilled are available. Eventually, in a nasty war situation you might be working with raw recruits who are very unskilled.

Aaron has stated that SE5 will track supplies, ordnance, and
experience level on a per ship basis in SE5. These affect how well a ship fights and its capabilities. BUT, how fully manned a ship is is another factor which greatly affects combat ability. Plus, each ship has to cycle through manpower on a regular basis. People get transferred, leave, die, etc...so you need to replace them.

If we added a personnel skill rating to each ship in addition to ordnance, supply, and experience, then we could simulate the continuous drain of manpower on having a large fleet by making the manpower of the nation have to feed into the ships. If it can't then the skill level of the crew might drop due to being filled with the
dregs of society, unskilled, etc...In other words, I'm talking about "manpower maintenance" in addition to other sorts of maintenance Aaron already has.

The personnel skill level would add to ship combat Ratings and perhaps maintence rate as well. When you can't provide new personnel to your ships to account for attrition, then the ship personnel skill rating would go down (you're sending out green recruits to fill spaces that were held by veterans before).

I come to this discussion because tracking US Navy readiness is what I do, and they basically track exactly these things on a per ship basis. Two hundred years of having a navy has taught the US that what is important for understanding ship readiness and capabilities is equipment, supplies, ordnance, training, and personnel. SE5 will apparently account for all but the latter.

And I think implementing something like this in SE5 but would come with little additional burden to the player. Just add an extra column to the imperial budget menus, an extra resource icon to the planet windows, a "manpower" cost to ship components, etc...

We would need to come up with "recruitment" and "attritition" rates for personnel, which would determine how many manpower points are recruited per million of population at any given planet, how rapidly crew skill degrades and needs to be replenished, and various schemes for facilities, racial traits, and government traits that modify both
recruitment and attrition.

Thanks for listening,
Alarik

Ps: If you wanted to run with this idea at the risk of making it complicated, perhaps we could even implement an "imperial policy"menu that would let us choose "draft" armies or "volounteer army" - the former would have a low level of inherent skill but yield a lot more
personnel, the later would yield much fewer but more skilled
personnel.

PPs: credit where credit is due: this idea is influenced not only by my work, but also other PBeM games I have played, namely Lords of the Earth (www.throneworld.com)

PPPS: cross-posted to the SE4 Yahoo forum for additional comments/critiques.