New Facility Idea- What's your opinion ?

[Baron Munchausen]

Originally posted by ELN-Gustyboy:
I had the idea of a new facility...
a facility which can make more place on a planet for population...a facility like Habitations or sometihng else which raise up the population capacity of the planet...
Do you think it is possible to mod this?
And do you think it will be a good facility?

Thanks.
Gustyboy

Yes, this is another fairly simple feature that has been requested for ages. I've been requesting an 'Arcology' facility for emergency housing (like when a planet destruction event pops up and you have one year to find new homes for thousands of population points) on a regular basis for some time. As with everything else, popularity seems to rule. If many people sent emails requesting this feature it would get done.

Since I've seen sphereworlds modded to have more than 100 billion population (100 thousand million) I presume that a double word is already used to track population of planets. As long as an Arcology only adds 100/200/300 million or so space I don't think you'd overflow the game's ability to track it.

[Puke]

emergency housing my fuzzy white butt, i have been asking forever for a facility type that will add extra facility slots. that way you can build hive worlds and archologies that will hold more pop and facilities after they are done.

of course, they were never added. probably never will be.

another simple yet good add would be to allow components to take up negative tonnage. that way you could add expensive, yet tonnage increasing components. currently the only way to do it is via mounts.

edit for clarity: Baron had some sharp things to say. i was NOT comparing him to my fuzzy white butt. re: mounts, i was refering to mounts that make existing components smaller and increase their cost.

if you could have negative size on a component, you could research minitureization technology to gain access to a negative sized component, and add as many as desired to your ships. that way, you dont have to edit the entire tech tree. of course, once mounts are researchable, its can be solved that way as well (although not as open-ended as it would be with the component)

[ July 03, 2002, 14:23: Message edited by: Puke ]

[Spuzzum]

[Never mind. I misinterpreted.]

[ July 04, 2002, 02:56: Message edited by: Spuzzum ]

[Lupusman]

You know Puke, if you use rogaine, you can turn that fuzz into real hair!

[ELN-Gustyboy]

I think we can put this post in relation with the other one which talk about cities on planets and so on...

[dogscoff]

IMHO the best solution would be to have all planets with zero (or very small) population capacity by default, and a higher number of facility slots. When you colonise it, the coloniser-ship turns into a population facility, which will house (say) 150 million ppl. To acheive higher potential population levels, you have to build more population facilities .

Since your population is taking up facility slots, you'd have to balance your population growth requirements against your production requirements for each planet:
You could choose a small population and a large number of production facilities, or you could invest the time and facilities required to build up a bigger population and benefit from the resulting bonuses, which would outperform the other strategy in the long run.

Planets where you can't breathe the atmosphere would have the same number of facility slots as equivalent-sized breathable planets, but the domed population facilities would hold much less population than the undomed ones. When the time comes to replace the domed population with a native-breathing one, you'd have to scrap all the domes to gain the extra facility slots.

For domed planets to be balanced against undomed ones, the "minimum population to operate facility" setting would have to be activated. Otherwise you could just build one small dome and fifty research facilities on a huge unbreathable planet, and there would be no real difference between domed and undomed worlds.

A cool added feature would be if the game could track maximum native-breather population and maximum domed population seperately for each planet. That way, you could build a dome on your homeworld (at the expense of a facility slot) to accomodate a limited number of aliens. It really winds me up the way that one million non-breathers on my homeworld of 8 billion can force the entire planet to be domed.

For micromanagment freaks, you could even track each atmosphere seperately, and force the player to build a dome for methane, another dome for hydrogen... all on the same planet. But I think that would be taking it too far.

Researching the right tech levels would of course result in higher-density population facilities and domes.

IMHO this would be an elegant and logical approach to population which would add an interesting layer of management and control to the game. Of course it's unlikely to happen before SE5...

EDIT: Just remembered another benefit of this model- when a planet is under attack, damage to the population would be much more realistic, with one (un)lucky hit to a dome or population centre wiping out huge numbers at once.

[ July 04, 2002, 11:39: Message edited by: dogscoff ]

[Baron Munchausen]

Well, Dogscoff, taking your idea a step further...

How about if the space on a planet is a single resource pool? You can build industrial facilities to support your empire, and use a certain amount of space, you can build housing for population, and use a certain amont of space, or you can store cargo -- troops, WPs, satellites, etc. -- and use that same space! This means that the 'cargo facility' would go out the window, of course. You'd get extra cargo space by NOT building facilities.

Combined with the 'labor' resource rules discussed in another thread this would make empire management very interesting. You'd have to balance industry with the population needed to operate it. If you over-develop a world it gets harder to defend it. And if you over-defend a world it gets harder to develop. And with no clear boundary on population you can have over-populated worlds, too. What next, birth control policies? Certainly there would be expansionist pressures on empires with a lot of over-populatd planets.

[ July 04, 2002, 21:00: Message edited by: Baron Munchausen ]