Manpower as a resource

[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...)

[Ed Kolis]

bearclaw said:
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...)

Really? I recall the sample data files he showed us had just the standard 3 resources as costs for a component... of course that might change... and of course with Labels.txt you can rename anything in the game so if you want to call your resources "material", "labor", and "energy", or "ironium", "boranium", and "germanium", or even "time", "talent", and "treasure" (for a church ministry mod? ) or "health", "mana", and "chi" (if you come up with the crazy idea of turning SE5 into a fantasy RPG )... ok, I'll stop rambling on about all the wondrous possibilities

[Makinus]

One way to not create more micromanagement would be to treat manpower in global scale, so planets with small and unhappy populations would produce only a very small quantity of ship crews, and big, happier populations would produce a lot of crews (with modifiers of facilities, if the planet is blockadedit will not produce crews, etc.), but the actual skill levels of the crews crewing the ships would be a simply comparasion of the number of ships in the fleet (with modifiers to attrition) with the global crew production of the empire...

So newbies to the game would not need to actually manage any new resource, since the "crew production" would not be actually "spent" but shared by all ships in a global scale (with some ships using more than others, since warships would need more crews)...

As an example in how this would work in game terms, if you have 3 planets, one being you homeworld and the other 2 being a small undeveloped colonies, and you have 15 ships

Let´s state that a ship need 1 "manpower point" to have a crew with 100% skill.

The homeworld would produce 10 "manpower points"
The colonies would produce each 1 "manpower points"
We would have a totoal pool of 12 "manpower points" that need to be divided to 15 ships, resulting in 0.8 point per ship, that would result in a crew with 80% skill handling the ships...

Of course we will need additional ways to represent the increased use of manpower by warships, and a crew skill would need to be capped at something like (like 150%), ships lost would decrease temporarily the global "manpower pool" and facilities could increase the "manpower points" productions of a planet or system, but the advantage of such system would be that you don´t increase micromanagement in any significat way, and adds a very fun factor to the game...

[gregebowman]

Another thing that might affect ships is computers. The more that the tech is researched, the more things can be automated and there would be less need for a skilled crew. It might take a lot of game years to do the research and gain the technology. In the meantime, you would need such skilled staff. But eventually, you'll need less population to build and crew ships. Then you can use them to colonize more planets.