Welcome Star Legacy Development Group!

[Ed Kolis]

Hmm, I don't recall if anyone had mentioned the colony infrastructure system before, so I guess I could describe it here...

Basically, it's like the population assignment system in MOO2 or the budget sliders in Civ - you reassign population to different tasks like mining, farming, and science.

The main difference is that there's also an "infrastructure" level on your colony. This infrastructure level determines how efficient your population is at doing whatever task. If you have more people assigned to a task than you have infrastructure for that task, then the excess people are "unemployed", and will not be as efficient at producing resources. The infrastructure, however, will grow over time to fill demand. On the other hand, if you have too little population to work the infrastructure, then the infrastructure decays over time as it's unused.

So, say you have 5 billion people on your homeworld, and 1 billion each of mining, farming, science, culture, and government infrastructure (infrastructure types subject to change). Your population is initially divided evenly among the five tasks, but let's say you want to focus your homeworld on science.

So you move half a billion people off of mining, say, to science. Now you have 500M miners with 1000M mining infrastructure, so you get, say, 500M metals, and your 500M unused mining infrastructure decays - now you have 950M total mining infrastructure, assuming a decay rate of 10% per turn.

On the science side of things, you have 1500M people trying to be scientists, but only 1000M science infrastructure! So you get your 1000M science points from the people who have infrastructure, plus a small amount from the people who are trying to work without infrastructure - say, 10%, or 50M science, for a total of 1050M science. Then, your infrastructure grows to 1050M (assuming a 10% growth rate) since there are 500M "unemployed" scientists. The next turn, your scientists will get to use that science infrastructure, for 1050M + (450M * 10%) = 1095M science points. Changing a planet's production takes work, just like in SE5 where you'd have to scrap and rebuild facilities, but it's much less micromanagement!

Though actually, writing this out like this makes me want to consider suggesting a change to the system - with the percentage growth and decay based on the number of unemployed people or unused infrastructure, you'll never actually reach your target level of production, so you'd actually be better off "overshooting" your allocations so you can actually get to the production levels you want to be at! Thus, I'd want to suggest basing the percentages on, say, one or the other of the two values (infrastructure and workers), or maybe the average of the two, rather than on the difference between them!

[Skyburn]

Would planets have innate value of some kind, like a mining value?

[Ed Kolis]

Yes, they will most likely have a value which is factored into the production calculations. Thanks for reminding me of that!

[MarcoPolo]

This sounds like an intriguing idea to planet and resource management.

What I want to know is whether a players empire will have autonomous and self sufficient planet resources, ie will they be almost like city states in CIV? What I mean is if a planet experiences starvation if growing faster than the infrustructure... then in Civilization there is little a player can do to aid one city over another, they basically are at the mercy of what the city micromanagement screen permits and will not help if the city infrastructure is maxed out. This kind of defeats the purpose of having an empire if you cannot stretch one city to its limits with the full support of the outlying colonies. Kind of like Rome, where all the riches can be hoarded to the capital from the provinces (which is what historically happened in Rome) to truly prosper and bring with it more wealth.

I always felt that it would be nice to allow the player the ability to push production in favour of having a larger capital or core planets with the support of outlying colonies being specialised to specific tasks. Like science (ie science moon colony) or manufacturing/production (asteroid refineries) ..so that a player can diversify and actually not just capture planets in order to just found more and more pointless colonies. Its wonderful to have alot of Earths to manage, but also making Earths not so abundant and having the choice of also settling rocks that are more geared for production than population would be interesting too.

It would open up other possibilities, and maybe even change the dynamics to waging war on an opponent (if say he has many many moons and asteroids that taking over 1 or 2 of his earth planets, will still not impact him since his production power lies in his control of the stars with huge asteroid and moon resources) Perhaps making moons and asteroids easier to colonies and less inefficient and specialised would throw a spanner in the works, from having to see countless 4X games in the past fall quickly into drudgery of many earth planets micromanagement.

Just my 2c

[Ed Kolis]

We are planning on having automatically generated "civilian freighters" used to transport population and resources about without direct supervision by the player. If this turns out to be too troublesome for pathing or combat, or too CPU-intensive, we can always fall back on a modified version of the "spaceport" system from Space Empires: if a colony has a spaceport, it can access the "global pool" of resources, otherwise it's limited to what it can produce locally! I doubt we'd go with a system where every colony is expected to be completely self-sufficient all the time!

[dumbluck]

Hmm. If you are planning on having the computer handle migration for you ala SE5, might I suggest Target Population Densities. It would just be slider bars for each valid race that you have access too. Don't want any aliens on the homeworld? Move the slider bar for your race up to 100%.

That brings up another question. How does SL handle non-breathable atmospheres? I'm thinking of a system where non-breathers suffer infrastructure limits. So you have 500M non breathers and 100M breathers on a planet? The 500M non-breathers would suffer an infrastructure limit (based on planet size), while the 100M breathers would work "outside the dome" and have no such limit.

So, if the non-breather infrastructure limit for the above planet, is, say 250M, then half your non-breather workforce would be without infrastructure. So you'd have 350M + (250M*10%=25M) = 375M production (assuming there was enough infrastructure in place for the the 250M non-breathers + 100M breathers).

Another thing to consider would be how having 500M non-breathers crammed into a 250M rated "dome" would affect happiness levels.

[MarcoPolo]

Sounds like a promising idea.

I just hope this doesn't turn into a spreadsheets in space game, because those I can't really stand anymore, hence why I never could get hooked on SEIV or SEV. Developers should understand that we are not living in the 80s anymore where one could ignore any graphical oversights in favour of more intense gameplay.

Peace.

[dumbluck]

How do you plan on handling construction? I was thinking maybe it should be just another factor in the Infrastructure idea you were talking about earlier. So if you want Planet A to start working on that Big Military Construction Project, you'll have to move people off of the Research they were working on. And if you don't have any Construction Infrastructure in place, it will take a while to spin up the construction rate.

Also, from the sounds of it you're going to have 4, 5, or even more sliders per planet, and moving one will make the others adjust accordingly. Without a way to lock the sliders in place, you'll end up spending a whole minute or two just getting the sliders where you want them. It would be much better if I could adjust Research to where I want it and lock the slider. Now when I move the Mining slider, Research stays put.

[Ed Kolis]

Regarding "locked" sliders, we've (actually I think it was Kwayne's idea, IIRC!) come up with a clever way to deal with that...

Remember MOO2, where you had the population assigned to various tasks (mining/farming/research)? To reassign population, you first click where you want to DEallocate people, then click where you want to allocate them TO. The farther left you click on the first list of people, the more people you deallocate from that task; then you just plop them down somewhere else.

We're adopting that same mechanic for allocating infrastructure growth and even research. The only difference is that it's a continuum of points allocated, not a granular "list" of people. So imagine you have 100 RP allocated to lasers, none to armor, and none to sensors. You want to move some RP from lasers to sensors, so you click somewhere in the lasers bar; if you click at exactly the halfway point of the bar you will end up grabbing 50 RP from lasers. Then you click in the sensors bar, and that moves the 50 RP (or whatever you just deallocated) over to sensors.

With this system, you don't have to worry about sliders reallocating themselves automatically, because you always explicitly specify where the points come from and where the points go!

[dumbluck]

Sounds entirely workable.