Agriculture: A use for Backwater Worlds

[Null (OP)]

So the premise is rather simple: food can be moved from where it is grown.  Worlds would have Agricultural policy settings, and would be something like:

1.  Subsistence agriculture (grows only what is needed on-site)

2.  Export Agriculture (allows production of surplus agricultural products, can be exported on freighters)

3.  Import Agriculture (allows extra foodstuffs to be imported, which boosts population growth and population cap)

This could benefit from more options, such as allocating more population to Agriculture, like 10%, 20%, 50% of surplus or something like that.


Waterworlds could be used for Fishing (perhaps after "seeding" them with life)

Worlds with a colony cost above 0 would suffer significant reductions in Agriculture efficiency (due to not being able to just plow a field and plant corn wherever you want)

Agriculture would have a "race" of crops, which all come from a specific world.  There would be a new "race" of crops generated alongside every species.  The agriculture Efficiency for a particular "race" and planet would be dependant on a few things.

1.  Terrain similarity.  Crops from a Jungle world won't do well on a Tundra one.  It may be possible to grow some crops in the wrong biome, but that would depend on the (possibly imaginary, but maybe not) areas of varying climate.

2.  Terrain Fertility.  This would be mostly seperate from crop race.  Something along the lines of "Jungle +30%, Tundra -65%, Chaparral +10%, Desert -20%"

3.  The amount of habitable area on the planet.

Some species may be able to eat another species' Racial Crops, though at a penalty if that.  Perhaps there could be a Bio/Gen research to boost efficiency of a particular crop race (you could consider it selecting ones that are edible to your race, and farming those instead of the others)


Crops might be able to be measured in tons, though that might be a problem for transport

Maybe Infrastructure-reliant colonies could be set to Import, which would free up infrastructure for Population.


Lastly, this system in particular might benefit from allowing a planet to have multiple terrain types, on a percentage scale.  For example: 60% Jungle, 20% Temperate Forest, 10% Desert, 5% Tundra, 5% Urban.

[goaowonk]

It'd be nice to be able to build agro installations so you can have greenhouse worlds providing your industrial or shipyard places

[SultanPepper]

While I love the idea of 'backwater worlds' from an RP perspective, I feel this would just make a LOT more micromanagement for not a huge amount of benefit. Maybe modifying this idea and adding it into the civilian pop/lines? Like declaring a planet an 'agriculture' world, for example (or 'fishing' world etc) and having ti handled through civilian lines and whatnot, taking the micromanagment out of the players hands.

[Jorgen_CAB]

While I love the idea of 'backwater worlds' from an RP perspective, I feel this would just make a LOT more micromanagement for not a huge amount of benefit. Maybe modifying this idea and adding it into the civilian pop/lines? Like declaring a planet an 'agriculture' world, for example (or 'fishing' world etc) and having ti handled through civilian lines and whatnot, taking the micromanagment out of the players hands.

To be honest I don't think that moving food is viable in Aurora in larger quantities than as a luxury item. The amount of food you would need for several hundred million (or billions) people would become extreme and Aurora is operating on a more "realistic" approach. The amount of tonnage of shipping needed would overshadow anything in terms of cargo weight. When looking at data from the real world you use about 1 ton per person of food per year.. that means a world with 100 million people would need 1000 shipment of food by 100.000t cargo ships per year, even if you just need to deliver 1/3 of the food that still is 333 trips for 100 million and 3333 tips for a billion people. The fuel alone would become insurmountable costs.

Transporting that amount of stuff from the surface to orbit would be extreme... Aurora are basically operating on the terms that all common minerals and materiel that is needed for society are found in ample quantities everywhere. It is only Newtonian elements that are rare enough to be bothered with for transportation.

Food is not really that much of an issue to be honest and shipping it probably is far more expensive than growing it locally , perhaps in some form of habitats if necessary.

The main use of small colonies are that they have a larger workforce per population living there, so you get more government production out of them and they grow faster than more populous planets.

[Alsadius]

If this sort of change was going to happen, it'd need to be part of a pretty massive change to the civilian economy. Which I'm totally on board with, to be clear, but which isn't likely to happen soon.

In practice, doing this will imply a gigantic increase in civilian traffic, for all the freighters to move the stuff around. That'll have some substantial performance impact, I'd wager, though grouping the civilian ships together into fleets could help substantially. Still, it's one to watch out for.

The up-side of this is that if we have such a system, there's a lot more of a role for commerce raiding, which is always fun.

[Jorgen_CAB]

To be honest I don't think it make all that much logical sense for moving food around rather than the minerals needed to sustain a colony by itself. All you need is a hydroponics bay infrastructure, energy from a star and water. The bio matter can be pretty much recycled so all you need is the energy of a star to grow the food once the basic minerals are there.

In my opinion it would be just to add a mechanic for adding a mechanic to have something perhaps i nteresting to do. I think there wold be more interesting things you could do with the economy and population. You could expand somewhat on unrest and individual planet administration issues for example. Perhaps introduce some sort of political model for planetary government or something.
You could make it so different trade goods have more importance than just trade income, perhaps trade goods will effect worlds positive or negatove depending on import/export needs and availability.
You could add some more functionality to wealth and expenditure aside of maintenance.

[Scud]

I think adding full on food/etc trading is kind of logistically unviable, but I like the idea of using backwater worlds to provide a certain amount of service/agriculture pop percentage “buff” to an associated world in the form of their free manufacturing populations.  For example, these are (imagined) numbers in the default game

Earth 100m pop > 25%ag 50%service 25% manufacturing
Luna 20m pop, with no manufacturing facilities> 25/50/25

This means Luna has 5m manufacturing pops waiting for work.

What if you could set a colony (in this case Luna) as “system service” and it would instead donate its spare population to filling out service/agriculture jobs in the system that can be done “remotely” (with diminishing returns)

This way if you have a mining world that has a high colony cost in the same system as a low colony cost, the low cost  colony could “subsidize” the service/ag requirements of the mining colony? It could be a new building, “system administrative facility” that takes manufacturing jobs and converts them at a diminished rate to support jobs for other system bodies.

This seems doable without many changes and works inside the games current economy (even the building is optional really)

[Father Tim]

I think adding full on food/etc trading is kind of logistically unviable, but I like the idea of using backwater worlds to provide a certain amount of service/agriculture pop percentage “buff” to an associated world in the form of their free manufacturing populations.  For example, these are (imagined) numbers in the default game

Earth 100m pop > 25%ag 50%service 25% manufacturing
Luna 20m pop, with no manufacturing facilities> 25/50/25

This means Luna has 5m manufacturing pops waiting for work.

What if you could set a colony (in this case Luna) as “system service” and it would instead donate its spare population to filling out service/agriculture jobs in the system that can be done “remotely” (with diminishing returns)

This way if you have a mining world that has a high colony cost in the same system as a low colony cost, the low cost  colony could “subsidize” the service/ag requirements of the mining colony? It could be a new building, “system administrative facility” that takes manufacturing jobs and converts them at a diminished rate to support jobs for other system bodies.

This seems doable without many changes and works inside the games current economy (even the building is optional really)

In broad terms, because then there wouldn't be as much pressure on your race to explore, and expand, and exploit.  In other words, three of the four Xs.

[Rich.h]

How about having installations for agriculture similar to financial centres. Though instead of generating wealth they give a % boost to your empires pop growth. Oviously this would need to be incredibly small per individual facility, and make them unable to be transported.

If they had a combination of requiring a large amount of workers and taking alot of build points then you have a rough simulation of colonists building up a network of farms and such. The sheer number of workers required will mean you cannot simply spam huge numbers on Luna and suddenly boost your empire growth by 100's%. Combine this with a wealth cost and you have another reason to require the currently lacking finance centres.

If it would take a large amount of work and cause too many bugs to have an empire pop bonus, then make the facilties provide a simple growth bonus to the colony only. This will then mean they become a source of colonists for your frontiers etc.

[Jorgen_CAB]

While I understand the sentiment of using food as some form of sparse or important resource to drive a new mechanic it makes zero logical sense to me. Food is a mere basic resource (as any other basic mineral) which does not matter in a Newtonian mineral rich world. Food is not important for population growth either in a post industrial era. Food was a limitation on population density in the past (not really growth that much) but it is not anymore. Planet size take the role of population density and limitation in Aurora, advanced hydroponic farms could easily support almost unlimited number of people through farming pretty much anywhere you have access to the light of a star.

To be honest I don't like to use food as an important resource at all... the game should be entirely driven by the Newtonian resources outside trade goods.

In my opinion there would be more interesting things that could be done with trade and population density.

I would just feel like it was a tacked on mechanic for the sake of having another resource to bother about. Newtonian resources already take the role of forcing expansion and providing a logistical headache, do we really need to add food to that when it make very little logical sense to bother much about it. We then would have to bother about all the other common minerals that we use in today's society as well as there are many minerals that are equally important for our society to function as a whole, not just food.

[Jorgen_CAB]

How about having installations for agriculture similar to financial centres. Though instead of generating wealth they give a % boost to your empires pop growth. Oviously this would need to be incredibly small per individual facility, and make them unable to be transported.

If they had a combination of requiring a large amount of workers and taking alot of build points then you have a rough simulation of colonists building up a network of farms and such. The sheer number of workers required will mean you cannot simply spam huge numbers on Luna and suddenly boost your empire growth by 100's%. Combine this with a wealth cost and you have another reason to require the currently lacking finance centres.

If it would take a large amount of work and cause too many bugs to have an empire pop bonus, then make the facilties provide a simple growth bonus to the colony only. This will then mean they become a source of colonists for your frontiers etc.

It would make way more sense to use some cloning facilities to generate more population as food have literally no impact on population growth in a modern society.

I'm also not sure if "building" population would be great for general game balance as population actually is one of the few hard limitations in the game and is one of the greatest reason to build new colonies as many small colonies generate a higher population growth and give you more manufacturing workers per population count.

Population currently is one of the few really limiting factors of expansion in the game and I think that is important and is one major factor that drive expansion. If you can just produce more population with population you will eventually expand population faster and faster the more population you have and that is counter productive to how it currently work as the more population you have in a single world the less it grow.

[Scud]

In broad terms, because then there wouldn't be as much pressure on your race to explore, and expand, and exploit.  In other words, three of the four Xs.

The game doesn’t really encourage colonizing anything other than mining locations/ruins, however. There are dozens of highly colonizable bodies  that I have had to overlook just because they didn’t provide one of those things. I don’t think it would be hugely detrimental to the game’s roots as a 4x to provide some sort of added function for these bodies, outside of RP.

[Jorgen_CAB]

In broad terms, because then there wouldn't be as much pressure on your race to explore, and expand, and exploit.  In other words, three of the four Xs.

The game doesn’t really encourage colonizing anything other than mining locations/ruins, however. There are dozens of highly colonizable bodies  that I have had to overlook just because they didn’t provide one of those things. I don’t think it would be hugely detrimental to the game’s roots as a 4x to provide some sort of added function for these bodies, outside of RP.

Sure it does.. the more colonies you have the more manufacturing population and general population growth you get. At some point population become the major limitation on economic growth and not new mining sites.

[Scud]

Sure it does.. the more colonies you have the more manufacturing population and general population growth you get. At some point population become the major limitation on economic growth and not new mining sites.

I never had that issue much in VB6, my starting world/earth always ended up providing more than enough manufacturing capacity, especially as mines were moved off-world.(this may just be a quirk of how I chose to play the game, however) Perhaps the population limit rules will come into play later on. I suspect this is something that simply needs longer-run campaigns to understand. There’s a lot of changes in C# that need more playtime to evaluate, and my games so far haven’t had a chance to get past a dozen hours or so. Still, I think there’s certainly room for more colonization opportunities.

[Jorgen_CAB]

Sure it does.. the more colonies you have the more manufacturing population and general population growth you get. At some point population become the major limitation on economic growth and not new mining sites.

I never had that issue much in VB6, my starting world/earth always ended up providing more than enough manufacturing capacity, especially as mines were moved off-world.(this may just be a quirk of how I chose to play the game, however) Perhaps the population limit rules will come into play later on. I suspect this is something that simply needs longer-run campaigns to understand. There’s a lot of changes in C# that need more playtime to evaluate, and my games so far haven’t had a chance to get past a dozen hours or so. Still, I think there’s certainly room for more colonization opportunities.

But the more factories you have the more mines and other buildings you can build and that means your population limit will end up being a limitation faster. You should end up building mostly Automated Mines at some point as using population for regular mines becomes a waste of population. But you need lots of industry to reach that point.

In C# you also will need allot more population for maintenance and shipyards as well as for financial buildings as well.

It might be a conventional start problem perhaps, I find that I often reach population limits for manufacture quite quickly in those games.