[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!