Construction speed and population size

[Nitram Draw]

Oh yeah construction is on fast forward but it is all relative, heck you can fully exploit a huge planet in the same time it taks to build a starbase.
I don't think I would enjoy the game as much if it took me 80 turns to build a cruiser. But I would like to see them implement the minimum population per facility to cover all facilities on a planet. That way you can't have 4m pop on a planet with 30 facilities and get the full production from them.

[derb]

In other games your population has a base construction ability and so do your factories. So you can use a small pop to build a factory then use both to build the next factory and so on. But it means if you start with a very small population it is going to take a long time to build that first factory. Having to have a minimum pop to "service" a factory also makes sense. Any chance this will be implemented, do you think? Is it something that can be easily done using the customisability of the game?

[Trachmyr]

In the mod I've got going, I 've fipped the plnet/population thing. Tiny Planets (moons) can build 10 facilities, while small+ planets all have 25 facilities. These facilities do not represent an actual "mine" or "lab" instead it represents how the population is divided for various production types. Now, population has a MUCH greater effect... a medium planet(which can now hold 10B people) has production/construction at twice the rate of a small planet (pop. 5B) if population is maxed (small planet have 150%, while medium has 300%, likewise large have 450% for 15B).

All dommed colonies, regardless of size, can have 2 facilities and 100M pop (which gives -25% to production rate) making the population roughly twice as productive as they should be, but then again we're talking about specialist to special worlds. (2facilites/25facilities=.08 x75%/300%=.02... while the population is .01 times that of the med. planet I was comparing it to.)

It works out very nicly, you actually search far and wide for habitable planets... and population really means someting!

[BlueMage]

Assuming unmodified settings.txt file; the population affects every production aspect of a facility. This includes the ship yards, research/intell, and resource gathering systems. Basically, for every one of the (possible) 20 population modifiers you can change how much a bonus population gives in both ship yard rate and/or production of reasources (intell/research/min/org/rad).

If you want a flat rate; simply change the ship yard bonus to zero in the settings.txt for all the population bonus areas.

[Trachmyr]

BTW, you can have more than 20 population modifiers... I use 46!

[rdouglass]

Trachmyr, I like the sounds of the mod you spoke of in your post:

In the mod I've got going, I 've fipped the plnet/population thing...

Is there any chance you could shed some light on the details of your mod? It sounds like one I'd like to use, but I have not had any time to explore any modding myself - besides, there is some great work being put out by others.

Maybe you could share your .txt files and / or the specific line-items? It would be very much appreciated by myself (and probably many others).

[serpwidgets]

quote:

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Maybe you could share your .txt files and / or the specific line-items? It would be very much appreciated by myself (and probably many others).

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This sounds awesome. It seems like population is currently not enough of a factor. I played a lot of BOTF and didn't like the fact that population was SO important to a system, yet you couldn't move people around. In SE4 you can move people around but it doesn't seem to make much of a difference. I think you've combined the best of both worlds and I'd really like to see it, too.

I wonder how the AI will fare with this type of setup. They seem to have a lot of sparsely populated planets spread all over.