New Facility Idea- What's your opinion ?

[dogscoff]

IMHO the best solution would be to have all planets with zero (or very small) population capacity by default, and a higher number of facility slots. When you colonise it, the coloniser-ship turns into a population facility, which will house (say) 150 million ppl. To acheive higher potential population levels, you have to build more population facilities .

Since your population is taking up facility slots, you'd have to balance your population growth requirements against your production requirements for each planet:
You could choose a small population and a large number of production facilities, or you could invest the time and facilities required to build up a bigger population and benefit from the resulting bonuses, which would outperform the other strategy in the long run.

Planets where you can't breathe the atmosphere would have the same number of facility slots as equivalent-sized breathable planets, but the domed population facilities would hold much less population than the undomed ones. When the time comes to replace the domed population with a native-breathing one, you'd have to scrap all the domes to gain the extra facility slots.

For domed planets to be balanced against undomed ones, the "minimum population to operate facility" setting would have to be activated. Otherwise you could just build one small dome and fifty research facilities on a huge unbreathable planet, and there would be no real difference between domed and undomed worlds.

A cool added feature would be if the game could track maximum native-breather population and maximum domed population seperately for each planet. That way, you could build a dome on your homeworld (at the expense of a facility slot) to accomodate a limited number of aliens. It really winds me up the way that one million non-breathers on my homeworld of 8 billion can force the entire planet to be domed.

For micromanagment freaks, you could even track each atmosphere seperately, and force the player to build a dome for methane, another dome for hydrogen... all on the same planet. But I think that would be taking it too far.

Researching the right tech levels would of course result in higher-density population facilities and domes.

IMHO this would be an elegant and logical approach to population which would add an interesting layer of management and control to the game. Of course it's unlikely to happen before SE5...

EDIT: Just remembered another benefit of this model- when a planet is under attack, damage to the population would be much more realistic, with one (un)lucky hit to a dome or population centre wiping out huge numbers at once.

[ July 04, 2002, 11:39: Message edited by: dogscoff ]

[Baron Munchausen]

Well, Dogscoff, taking your idea a step further...

How about if the space on a planet is a single resource pool? You can build industrial facilities to support your empire, and use a certain amount of space, you can build housing for population, and use a certain amont of space, or you can store cargo -- troops, WPs, satellites, etc. -- and use that same space! This means that the 'cargo facility' would go out the window, of course. You'd get extra cargo space by NOT building facilities.

Combined with the 'labor' resource rules discussed in another thread this would make empire management very interesting. You'd have to balance industry with the population needed to operate it. If you over-develop a world it gets harder to defend it. And if you over-defend a world it gets harder to develop. And with no clear boundary on population you can have over-populated worlds, too. What next, birth control policies? Certainly there would be expansionist pressures on empires with a lot of over-populatd planets.

[ July 04, 2002, 21:00: Message edited by: Baron Munchausen ]

[geoschmo]

Guys, really. If you want all that, just play Outpost. Don't you think there is enough to keep track of as it is with SEIV?

Geo

[Baron Munchausen]

Originally posted by geoschmo:
Guys, really. If you want all that, just play Outpost. Don't you think there is enough to keep track of as it is with SEIV?

Geo

Well, if the AI managed ships better there wouldn't be so much to keep track of. But anyway, I don't like a 'pure' war game. I want a simulation that includes the possibility of armed conflict. SimCity is nice but too simplistic. The previous generations of 4X games were just plain to simplistic. MOO 3 seems to be moving in the right direction. I'm really looking forward to it even if it has been reduced a lot from the ambitious original design.

So, yes, I think it's worthwhile to discuss how to flesh out the infrastructure underlying your empire.

[Spuzzum]

Same here, Baron -- conflict and armed battles are fun and all, but for me the thrill of playing space games is the chance to be an evil or not-so-evil overlord, controlling my population with an iron or fleshy fist and being forced to negotiate and fight off the threat of those hideous or not-so-hideous aliens.

Food for thought: some of the most entertaining competitive games of all time, like M.U.L.E., featured no combat at all. ;-)

[jimbob]

Well, this isn't quite the same, but I was thinking of having a racial trait of "subterranian" (as seen in MOO2) that costs 2000 to 2500 points. You can't actually have more population, but you could simulate it by having "larger" facilities (reaching deep into the ground) that produce more resources/intel/research because they house more workers. These facilities would say produce 50% more than the typical facilities at each level. Thus you would have 50% more facilities (kind of).

I didn't actually execute this mod because there are just so many buildings that would need to be added to the game, and quite frankly, I like being married But maybe some one else would like to run with it?

Cheers,

[Suicide Junkie]

There's not a whole lot of difference between that and the racial trait "Advanced Storage", ISTM.