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.

[Captain Kwok]

I disagree.

I think better use of population modifiers is an easier and more effective (i.e. less micromanagement) way of doing the same thing. Stock SE:IV is not so great at this as you can have 100% production/build rate with just 1M people.

If a planet has 100M people on it, then it's safe to assume that there will be plenty of skilled labour available. Make that level the base production/build rate, and then add new modifiers at whatever population amounts you desire, 10-20-30M etc, with a reduced rate.

[Fyron]

Have you tried SJ's Gritty Economics mod? It turns organics into labor "man-hours" and radioactives into power (or energy or something).

[Saber Cherry]

I totally agree (with the original post). I find one of the biggest (problems / unrealisms / unbalances / whatever one may call it) with SEIV is the population issue. It's just irrelevant. The strength of an empire is in its people... which holds true in Civilization, Master of Orion, Stars!, real life, and so forth, where people do work. In SEIV, buildings do work, and people just make them a little more efficient.

In SEV, I'm looking forward to reductions in micromanagement, better graphics, better tactical battles, better AI, and hopefully increased realism like QNP. But beyond all those, I'm hoping population becomes not only relevant, but vital and realistic. Currently, the name "Space Empires" is misleading, as it is just a wargame... a real population that really did the work in the empire would make it a true empire-building game.

This cannot be accomplished with the current "give buildings a bonus if there happen to be people on the planet" model, or even a highly graduated model based on that system.

-Cherry

[Fyron]

This cannot be accomplished with the current "give buildings a bonus if there happen to be people on the planet" model, or even a highly graduated model based on that system.

Sure it can. Check out the PBW Version of Pirates and Nomads mod or the Proportions mod. Population is critically important in such mods, as your planets do practically nothing without decent levels of it. Population becomes a resource that must be managed. Of course, such mods require a lot more micromanagement to get your empire going... :-\

[se5a]

Good idea, but dont make it even harder for the underdog to get ahead.

[AMF]

I think it could be done so that the opposite ocurred.

That is, I think such a concept might actually level the playing field in that we're talking about using population as a resource that gives skilled labour. Depending on how it was implemented, and given that the difference in population between a big empire and a small empire is generally much less than the difference in ship numbers or economy between the same two empires, it could help out the little guy.

I look at it sort of like this. When one produces a starship one doesn't just need highly skilled and motivated crews, but the highly skilled labor to build and maintain them and the infrastructure to support them. In societies that we're talking about in SE4/5, where space exploration, exploitation, and colonization is a major part (if not *the* major) undertaking of their societies, you need a lot of people to make it work.

I posit that the manpower requirements for the ships/weapons platforms/troops themselves, *as well as* the manpower requirements to build them, support them, and support the infrastructure that supports them are pretty significant.

How many people in the US (or any other country today) are skilled enough to perform a complex and dangerous job in the military? Not too many, percentage-wise. Let's say a tenth of a percent.

That means that in a mid-sized colony of 100M people you might expect 10,000 availalbe personnel for these things.

Now, each turn is a month, and you not only have to build and support, but account for attrition for these ships/weapons/troops and it quickly seems to me that the manpower requirement is non-trivial.

Plus, adding manpower would be FUN - becuase it allows various modifiers, racial traits, and facilities to have the effect you'd expect. Those Fanatical cultures to get the bonus that they really deserve - a bunch of fanatics, no limit to manpower for them. StarFleet Acaemy increases the base skills of manpower. Labor camps increase manpower, but decrease it's skill, etc...propoganda intel ops could decrease enemy recruitment, etc... the possibilities are pretty vast...

And it really makes those happiness modifiers have the effect you expect - populations unhappy? Reduced manpower.

And it adds an important and real life aspect the game - ship crews - which, trust me, are very important for the operation of a naval vessel.

And it's realistic: if your empire starts suddenly pumping out gazillions of warships each turn, you would think that the quality of the crews would decrease. Likewise, if you're under siege and you start press-ganging everyone over the age of twelve, well, the effects could be felt.

And given that it would be handled just like a "fourth resource" I don't see a lot of added micromanagement. Make it into an option at game start for that matter...

Have I begun to beat the dead horse yet...?



Alarik

se5a said:
Good idea, but dont make it even harder for the underdog to get ahead.

[gregebowman]

But if you want to be realistic, it's going to take 180-200 turns for a population to produce enough personnel to produce enough of a crew to a "human" ship. That's 10 turns per year times 18-20 years for a human child to reach maturity. Other races may produce adult personnel sooner, depending on their physiology. I think this should be taken effect into gameplay, although I'm not sure how it could be done.

[Makinus]

I do agree with the first and second Posts, while this looks contraditory, let me sexplain myself:

I do agree that ship personel should be handled in the way that alarikf stated, as in every RL situation and in the majority of SF books that i read we see that a nation,empire, etc. that have a huge flet normally have more unskilled personal manning their ships against an empire with a smaller fleet (the population bases being equal), and, when you have a war, attrition loses forces you to employ more unskilled personel...

In an additional note, you woould only lose personel quality by "attrition" if you actually lose ships, and in a very small rate in comparision of quality lost because of the size of the fleet, since wars and conflits tend to increase the skill leels of the personel involved (at leats of the ones that survive the battles).

As about Cap Kwok said, facilities and planetary production should not be affected in the same way than ships, as the population numbers used in SE allow a lot of "grunt labor", and modern facilities productions in the tech level in wich the game start should not need to bia a personel to man (lots of automation)...

It is important to note that in the to instances aove we are handling with 2 different types of skill: the first would be the skill to navigante, maintain and possibly (in the case of warships) to fight with a spaceship, and the second the skill of using an suposedly higly automatized facility to produce resources...

In another note, if the manpower scheme sugested by alarikf is used for ships, we must create a way so the warships end using better skilled and bigger crews than support ships, since (at least i think so) any empire woul put his most skilled people in a battlecruiser instead of a simple pop transport...

just my two cents...

[bearclaw]

Did Aaron not say that the actual resources will be moddable with something like 5 different resource 'slots' availiable? This would mean that even if personel and/or manpower are not in SEV stock game, both of these options and many many more could easily be modded into it.

(starts drooling, thinking about the possiblities...)