Life is cheap!

Suicide Junkie · #1 April 16th, 2001, 06:18 PM

quote:
The reproduction rate seems pretty good to me. What I think would be neat, if possible, is a penalty for overpopulation. If you were within a certain percentage of your max population you would lose production/happiness due to overcrowding

Seems to me that would be an incentive to dump people into space.

nerfman · #2 April 16th, 2001, 07:06 PM

A few points here:

1) While maybe not completely realistic, I think the rates of growth allow for noticable expansion during the game while still requiring a player to defend his population base.

2) The amount of people that can be fit into cargo is a bit crazy though. When I can get the entire population of Texas into a single transport ship I think things are getting a bit kooky. I would like to be able to change the amount of people that can be placed on a ship.

3) On a similiar note, I think that colony ships are too easy to build early in the game. Maybe its just my old MOOII days, but starting another major colony should require a little more effort.

4) What would be really cool is if population increase was based on a Malthus curve. Basically it exponentially approached zero at either end of the extreme (no population or max). This makes sense because there is very low birth rates in either case. In the middle region, growth would be at a maximum. This would make population growth a function of current capacity and would require players to try and balance populations out so that they have more "elbow room." Planets that are around 50% full would have the highest growth. Of course the actual rate would be modified by the racial and planet modifiers. In the end though, the player who manages their colonization efforts will get the best growth which makes more sense.

Nitram Draw · #3 April 16th, 2001, 08:14 PM

Maybe you could gain production and lose happiness as your population got closer to max. This way you have something to lose/gain either way.

Urendi Maleldil · #4 April 16th, 2001, 09:20 PM

I think the reproduction rate is fine the way it is, but a slight increase would be better. The thing we need for populations to not be so 'cheap' is to have greater consequences for icing a planet's population. If, for example, we had a Mars colony, and the Martian government decided to dump large ammounts of people into deep space, I'm sure the population of Earth, unless they really hated the Martians for some reason, would become very unhappy with the government of Mars.

Puke · #5 April 16th, 2001, 09:59 PM

quote:
Originally posted by nerfman:
A few points here:

2) The amount of people that can be fit into cargo is a bit crazy though. When I can get the entire population of Texas into a single transport ship I think things are getting a bit kooky. I would like to be able to change the amount of people that can be placed on a ship.

what, didnt you see the old star trek episode where they transformed the crew into small 3-inch styrofoam polyhedrials?

Taqwus · #6 April 16th, 2001, 10:12 PM

Agreed, that colony ships should probably be more expensive -- it's a MAJOR endeavor to create a viable colony on another world, or should be. Combining that, with, say, Troop Tech level 1/ Troop Weapons 1 by default, and possibly making logistics more important by boosting weapon firing costs, might greatly increase the number of battles to capture rather than merely obliterate colonies.

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-- The thing that goes bump in the night

Daynarr · #7 April 16th, 2001, 11:29 PM

quote:
Originally posted by nerfman:
3) On a similiar note, I think that colony ships are too easy to build early in the game. Maybe its just my old MOOII days, but starting another major colony should require a little more effort.

You can already do that by increasing resources necessary to build a colony component (in the components.txt file).

Trachmyr, there are values in the settings.txt file that allow you to change default reproduction rate. So, if you think that growth value is too high/low, you can fix it yourself.

Another good way to reduce the high reproduction rate is to increase the cost for reproduction characteristics (also in the settings.txt file). IMO that traits first 10 levels are TOO cheap - right now reproduction is the most cost-effective characteristics to increase. If you try to play the game using default 100% of reproduction, you will find game much more challenging (you will note the difference, trust me).