Proportions....

oleg · #1 February 2nd, 2003, 04:44 PM

AI is trying to fill planet till it gets 300 population units, AFAIK. my idea is to make 300 pop. units a small amount. I suggest to increase pop. capacity of all planets 10 times, decrease pop. mass 10 times and scale up all population modifiers 10 times in settings.txt. Pop. check should stay same - I made a mistake. Basically it will be the same game, but 1 pop.unit will represent 10 times less people. It is of course remains to be seen how population minister will behave.

oleg · #2 February 2nd, 2003, 06:59 PM

Hurra !! It works ! I increased planet population 10 times (Earth will have 20 billion instead of 2), scaled up population modifiers and decreased pop. mass. Now, SE IV ships 500 (not 300) to a planet than shifts to another ! New 500 is exactly 50 in "unmodded" Proportions. Funny thing happens in Planet with moons. After filling planet, SE ships 500 million people to a moon before going to another planet

. Anyway, it works and works much better than in 1.78 IMHO.
I can post modded data files if you like.

NAV · #3 February 2nd, 2003, 07:11 PM

[quote]Originally posted by PvK:
[QB] (Note the AI stopping at 100 is just a player suggestion - I thought people were saying the 1.84 behavior is to try to fill planets completely. No?)

I was not suggesting any change to Proportion settings, wich are currantly great. I was remarking that in v1.78 the AI sent the Star Liners (Pop Transports) too only the closest breathable colony, after that colony was filled to about 300m it would move on to the next breathable colony and so on. NOW in v1.84 the AI sends it to the closest planet to its Home World, fills it up to about 300m and works out from there. This could be a breathable or worse a domed moon. To me the return overall was much higher whan the AI sent the transports to breathables only.

PvK · #4 February 2nd, 2003, 09:14 PM

I'm with you NAV. I also think it'd be best if the AI's population transport could be specified in the files for each AI, so we could customize it per AI, and to work best with mods that change what makes sense to do.

oleg, I see now, that sounds like it works well, with the only real casualty being that now you can move population with a ship having only 100 kT cargo space, not 1000 kT, which I liked because it kind of made population a different Category from other unit transport. This also of course wouldn't be upgradable for existing games, because their effective population would go down 90%. I'd probably want to add another nine population effect brackets on the low end, to make moving less than ten units to a new colony pretty weak, and I'd want to adjust things like random and intel events, and maybe look at what it does to militia and planetary bombardment.

Since it would be for new games, I think I might actually keep population mass at 1000kT, and then make starliners ten or more times cheaper, and/or maybe slower but more capacious... this might make small starliners useful later into the game, and slow enough that people wouldn't be tempted to use them for invasion transports or carriers etc. Hmm. It will take some more thought. I have the feeling 3.0 will look a lot different from 2.5.3 (if I can find time to figure it all out and complete it).

PvK

oleg · #5 February 3rd, 2003, 02:00 AM

Common, we have cars and busses, Cesna and Boeng-747 to carry people. There should be no reson why we can move 1M but not 100K !

Anyway, starliner modules are still most effective components for transports and that means transports should be huge. Incidently, increasing population ten times takes care of the integer number artifact - no longer 1M colony will jump to 2M in one year, it will be 10M to 11 M !

PvK · #6 February 3rd, 2003, 02:30 AM

But, can you take a ship designed to deploy a single drone or a single satellite or some mines, and use it to transport 100,000 people and all of their possessions and necessities, for several months through space, and keep them alive, without serious amounts of life support equipment? No.

Realistically speaking, cargo should not be completely interchangeable based on equal mass. At the least, units should include the mass and cost required to keep them intact for a long space voyage. Unfortunately, SE4 lacks SE3's restrictions on cargo type. The only way I see to mod in some distinction using SE4, is to make the population units so large that there becomes an incentive to build specialized ships which wouldn't be efficient to use for mundane transport. That is, starliners. If we do as you suggest, except keep the pop mass at 1000kT, then with some changes to starliners and their modules, maybe we can have starliners carrying about 10x as many population units, but remaining relatively slow, so unit transports would more efficiently be built on faster lower-capacity transport hulls, while population transport would more efficiently use starliners.

PvK

oleg · #7 February 3rd, 2003, 04:59 PM

Well, single drone weights 15 000 tons. Obviously the ship capable to carry, service and launch such a device should be able to carry few people instead. Or look at small troop transport. It carries enough troops to conquier whole planet

Besides, why are we talking about 2m tall, 70 kg weighting aliens ? Last time I saw UFO crew on TV (in "Taken" I think) were very punny.

[ February 03, 2003, 15:02: Message edited by: oleg ]