New to the game and I have a question

[Slick]

This is what you are thinking of:

7.2.9 Captured population (by any means) loses all of its racial attributes and is identical to yours except they retain their atmosphere breathing so can be used to populate your colonies appropriately AND they slowly get unhappy over time so you need to account for that so they don’t riot (riot police, upc, etc.).The positive happiness effect of 10 troops of any type will exactly cancel out the negative happiness of having alien population on a planet.

Not really the answer to the question at hand. The key (as stated by Gandalph) is that each troop adds 2 happiness points. You can read through the happiness.txt file to find values for all (or at least most) of the happiness modifiers.

Slick.

[Fyron]

To make it explicit, a police troop is a small troop with only a cockpit (or filled with electric discharges for organic races). They are not for combat, only for being as cheap as possible so you can get as many as you need on a planet built in the shortest possible timeframe. Small troop with 3 electric discharge IIIs costs 120 min and 90 orgs, whereas a small troop with only a cockpit costs 120 mins. So for organic races, you might as well throw in the weapons as a backup measure.

I do not know how many troops you need exactly. 1 troop will give a happiness bonus, though not much of one. Generally, 30 troops are not enough to have an effect when real anger increasing events happen (planet glassings, lots and lots of ship losses, even when winning the war overall!). 60 sometimes help, but normally only on worlds deep within your territory where there is a lot of construction going on (mostly of ships by that point ) and when you are only suffering relatively minor losses. 90 will keep the planets jubilant most of the time, except in the face of grave losses. 120 will keep them jubliant in nearly all conditions that are not leading up to your absolute destruction. I measure in Groups of 30 because that is the smallest number I am usually able to build per turn on planets with SYs when I end up paying attention to happiness (16 at planets with no SY). I rarely get into early wars, and that is only when I am the one attacking in a guaranteed victory, so I don't really pay much attention to police troops in the early stages of the games. It only takes at most 4 turns to get planets with a SY with enough troops to guarantee jubilant population, after all. Planets never riot in the span of only 4 turns (at least, I have never seen them go from jubilant to riots in just 4 turns). There is a maximum increase in anger levels per turn, after all.

You can not figure out exactly how many are necessary because there are too many variables to take into account. But, just keep in mind that over 100 usually seems to do the trick.

[ May 23, 2003, 08:59: Message edited by: Imperator Fyron ]