Population in SEIV

[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

[geoschmo]

Originally posted by Imperator 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.

Alas, I am hitting the same wall. It appears maybe this will not work after all. I had not tried hitting end turn before when I determined the game would allow an 8 digit number for the population.

Geoschmo

[Fyron]

Increase the structure of weapon platforms to compensate, and then increasing the dmg of planetary weapons isn't a problem.

[Baron Munchausen]

Originally posted by 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

Yes, changing the scale would help in some ways. You'd better remember to fix the population bonuses or every colony will be at max production in a hurry. But having a ship only able to move a few thousand colonist would be nice, and population growth would be much more realistic. This would slow the game even more, of course. But apparently many people like the way Proportions works and it slows the game, too.

[Baron Munchausen]

Originally posted by 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

Actually, making planets harder to destroy is not a bad thing. We had a whole thread about how ridiculously easy it is, remember? But do change the number of militia per point of population! Or planets will not only be indestrucible but unconquerable. If we changed militia by a factor of 1000 just like population we'd then have a very real incentive to invade rather than slag planets. The difficulty of just killing everyone on a planet would be very high.

As far as reproduction, we can reduce it somewhat, yes, but if you scale it back to make large planets seem 'realistic' you'll make new colonies unable to grow. Dropping the default reproduction rate to 5 percent would be good. I wish we could limit the bonuses from happiness but only production is modifiable.

[ July 11, 2002, 00:41: Message edited by: Baron Munchausen ]