Population in SEIV

[geoschmo]

Right, those would require some hard code changes. What do you think abou tht esecond half of my post about changing the scale of population in SEIV. That could be done in a mod without any code changes. I may be missing some points though that could make it totally unworkable.

Geoschmo

[Repo Man]

I would love it if population were handled almost exclusivly by competant AI. If I had my way, population movement should not be abstracted, rather keep the current system of transports in place, but have them on full AI control. Players would have an incentive to produce enough transports to meet movement demands, and a failure to have enough transports would adversely affect the economy.

Players would then have to worry about protecting these AI controlled transports against other empires raiders and dare I say, pirates and space monsters.

It would a lot to the game to have more to do than blindly expand.

[capnq]

In Roman numerals, 'M' is 1000.

[Fyron]

Hmm... this is going into Fyron's Quadrant Mod v2.00.

[geoschmo]

Originally posted by capnq:
In Roman numerals, 'M' is 1000.

Cool! So we call it the Roman Mod.

Of course once you hit 1000M it switches to 1B. B wouldn't by chance be the Roman numeral for Million would it?

Geo

[Fyron]

Geoschmo, I just tried this and got a RCE when hitting "End Turn". I started a game with a medium homeworld and I took Advanced Storage Techniques. Here is the entry for the medium planet (with other changes to it):

Name := Medium
Physical Type := Planet
Stellar Size := Medium
Max Facilities := 15
Max Population := 8000000
Max Cargo Spaces := 8000
Max Facilities Domed := 5
Max Population Domed := 1067000
Max Cargo Spaces Domed := 4000
Constructed := False
Special Ability ID := 0

Oh yeah, I made these changes to Settings.txt too:

Population Mass := 5
Reproduction Check Frequency := 100

[ July 10, 2002, 20:03: Message edited by: Imperator Fyron ]

[geoschmo]

Ok, so seriously I am looking for problems with this idea. The first thing that comes to mind is if you multiply the polpulation by 1000, you've just made planets 1000 times harder to destroy. I am all for making planets tougher, but I haven't heard anyone suggesting they need to be 1000 times tougher. TO counter this some you can reduce the damage to kill one pop in the settings.txt file. It's at 10 by default. So you reduce this to 1 and it's only 100 times harder than it is now to destroy a colony. Is this too tough? We can increase the power of planetary weapons to help with this, but will it be enough? And if it is does it take Weapon platforms completely out of the equation. There are some details to work out in this before anyone tries implementing this change.

Next would be reproduction. If we change the scale of the population numbers, but not counter that somehow with the reproduciton then people skip right over rabbits and start breeding like bacteria. That's no good. We can change the reproduction check frequency. Not sure how high you can make it. I'll have to test that some. Is taht all you would need to do to correct this? Maybe I am missing something else important. along these lines.

Geoschmo