C# Suggestions

[LuuBluum]

Would it be possible to change the population growth rate from the current system (I think it's like the minimum of 20/P^(1/3) and 0.1 up to a third of the population capacity, at which point it is a linear fall-off) to a logistic equation? Wouldn't be much more complicated than the current method. Would be simply r*P*(1-P/K), where P is the current population, r is a growth rate constant (that variable we put in per species, fudged a bit to make population grow sufficiently fast for a 4x game), and K is the population capacity (calculated the same as currently). That way instead of current (where colonies have crazy-fast growth rate at first until leveling off), it would be a nice logistic curve: slow to start, fast in the middle, and then smoothing out at the end. Plus this accounts for if the population exceeds the population capacity; at that point the equation becomes negative.

Actually... in the same suggestion, would it be possible to replace population capacity in that equation with min(population capacity of planet, population supported by infrastructure)? That way colonies don't outpace the infrastructure being put in place, and actually account for it in their growth.

Computationally-speaking, I think this should actually be cheaper to calculate given that it avoids that cubic root.

This should also play nicely with the "colony cost range" effect of the new eccentric orbits, given that the population supported by infrastructure would vary as well, and that this equation can handle going negative just fine.


If you want a good estimate for the current actual human population growth rate, assuming that the equation is working with millions of population as a unit, r should be about 0.00037. That should give roughly a population growth rate of 1 for 7.9 billion people where the population capacity is 12 billion: where we are now.

[dsedrez]

Make sure that you always SM the fuel efficiency technology so it is at minimum 0.5 after you research it. This makes the civilian build more expensive but more efficient ships so will have less of them but are a bit more efficient. This will help with overall performance... it does require some micromanagement as you need to SM in the actual level of efficiency that you researched when designing a more efficient engines for your commercial designs, but can be worth it for overall game performance.

I pretty much do this all the time now in my games. Your civilian fleet will develop a bit slower but it is probably worth it overall from a game performance perspective.

I would like if there were an option in the game that civilian ships always built their ships with the more expensive 0.5 engine as that will save game resources so I did not need to deal with this manually. I know it might not be realistic and they should use the more fuel efficient engine. But mechanically it does not really matter as they don't consume fuel anyway and game performance is more important.

I'm not sure I understand. Jorgen. You're not referring to fuel consumption, because it doesn't affect engine cost, right? Is it engine power, then? I've stopped researching lower EP ratings when I noticed the civ lines abusing it... newer ships were *slower* than the earlier ones because they "upgraded" the engines.
Are you saying to mod civ commercial engines to be, say, 0.7 engine power rather than 0.5 where they start? So they're faster but also more expensive? How can I do that with SM? Can I SM edit the civ designs?

I was talking about engine power yes, not fuel efficiency technology... the engine power effect fuel efficiency though.

So... what I meant was that you use SM to keep your engine power level at a minimum of 0.5, this make civilian ships more expensive but faster, so more efficient. The civilians otherwise use cheaper and slower ships.

This way you  reduce the amount of civilian ships your civilians build, ut they also are more efficient as they will be faster.

I then use SM whenever I myself design an engine based on what I researched. I then SM back to 0.5 engine power technology at minimum so the civilians keep using that technology.

Ok. I thought you were referring to SM-editing the civ designs to put, say, a 0.7 engine in place of the one they've used originally. I tested and yes, you can do that. It seems the designs aren't even locked. What I didn't do was try the game in this configuration: I don't know if the civ will build new ships, if they'd work correctly etc. Maybe a test for later.
Maybe I *can* add some sensors, something I've wanted to do for a long time... though it has to be checked whether their output will be shown to the player.

[nuclearslurpee]

[math]
That way instead of current (where colonies have crazy-fast growth rate at first until leveling off), it would be a nice logistic curve: slow to start, fast in the middle, and then smoothing out at the end. Plus this accounts for if the population exceeds the population capacity; at that point the equation becomes negative.

It's important to note that this is actually a significant change to the game economy, as right now an important motive for colonization is that smaller populations grow more quickly and population soon becomes a critical resource for a mid-game empire. If you shift the curve to make small colonies grow slowly, the game's economics have to be completely reevaluated. It is one of those cases where making the game "more realistic" might not be good for gameplay. It can certainly work but it would involve a lot of rebalancing work to make sure it works right and doesn't break the core economic mechanics.

[LuuBluum]

[math]
That way instead of current (where colonies have crazy-fast growth rate at first until leveling off), it would be a nice logistic curve: slow to start, fast in the middle, and then smoothing out at the end. Plus this accounts for if the population exceeds the population capacity; at that point the equation becomes negative.

It's important to note that this is actually a significant change to the game economy, as right now an important motive for colonization is that smaller populations grow more quickly and population soon becomes a critical resource for a mid-game empire. If you shift the curve to make small colonies grow slowly, the game's economics have to be completely reevaluated. It is one of those cases where making the game "more realistic" might not be good for gameplay. It can certainly work but it would involve a lot of rebalancing work to make sure it works right and doesn't break the core economic mechanics.

Fair. For what its worth, the growth rate exceeds that of the current mechanic (with that r constant) at about 275 million. You can fudge the constant, of course, if you want it to be a faster or slower growth, and doing so is proportional to when that overlap happens. Take the rate x10, and it exceeds at 27 million; x100, and at 2 million.

Of course, since growth is effectively exponential until halfway to the population capacity, doing such a thing makes the population shoot off into the stratosphere pretty quick. I agree that it's a hard thing to balance; my goal isn't realism here but just to smooth out the lower end. Which... well, the straightforward one for that is the logistic equation. Issue is as you mentioned, that it creates a population crunch for the midgame until you manage to hit that critical population blow-up point. Which... well, moving 300 million people isn't exactly trivial.

[nuclearslurpee]

I'm definitely not opposed to it on principle, because encouraging the kind of "medium"-size hundreds-of-millions population colonies is good for roleplay in my opinion. Presently the balance seems to be toward the extremes, with low-pop colonies to breed more colonists and high/max-pop colonies as major hub worlds. It's just that such a key element of the game economy has to be handled carefully.

[LuuBluum]

Yeah, the big change would be that supporting a colony with colonists from well-inhabited main worlds would be the main way to encourage their growth, by exploiting the high growth rate of mid-populated planets. Colony ships would increase in volume for sure.

[ArcWolf]

I was talking about engine power yes, not fuel efficiency technology... the engine power effect fuel efficiency though.

So... what I meant was that you use SM to keep your engine power level at a minimum of 0.5, this make civilian ships more expensive but faster, so more efficient. The civilians otherwise use cheaper and slower ships.

This way you  reduce the amount of civilian ships your civilians build, ut they also are more efficient as they will be faster.

I then use SM whenever I myself design an engine based on what I researched. I then SM back to 0.5 engine power technology at minimum so the civilians keep using that technology.

ahh, that makes sense, i had no idea what you were saying either. Not something i have to worry about though, i never research the tech for lower ep then .5, i see no reason to (i also play on 15-20% research speed, so i have more important techs to worry about).

[H11F]

Kind of a random thought I had earlier today when looking at medals, and some of the conditions - it felt like it would be better if some of the medals could be assigned to the ship instead.   Not sure of the work required, but it would be interesting to grant decorations to the ship instead of officers crewing it, or even just the ability to add notes to a ship.

[cdrtwohy]

so was thinking about something, Population Capacity is defined as the Capacity of a population giving its current Food, Water and other Necessities usage and production, given that humans (and im going to assume other Sapient and industrial creatures) can change the carrying capacity by more efficient farming methods and other environmental things id like to propose the idea of a research that increases the Max population of a planet to represent things like conventional orbital industry, improvements in Farming tech based on the TN mats, and improved energy production also based on the discovery of the TNs, 

[ArcWolf]

Ya, that is 1 thing that annoys me about aurora. I understand you need to put a pop cap on a planet, but earth is capable of supporting 10s to 100s of times more population then the cap in game.

Just to give you an idea, We could fit the entire population of the USA and Canada into the state of New York and still have about 20% of the land area of that state left unpopulated if we lived at New York City levels of population density. New Jersey is the most densely populated state in the US (1,200 per sq. Mile). We could fit the entire US population in the state of Texas and still have room at that density. And we could fit the world population in the area of the US (including Hawaii & Alaska) and China leaving the rest of the world 100% devoid of human life.

The biggest use of land is agriculture. Roughly 1.43 mil sq. miles of the US is farm land and that can support roughly 570,000,000 people. But were talking about a game where we can feed 10s of millions if not 100s on a planet with no atmosphere, meaning we would have to have extensive aeroponics and hydroponics infrastructure which would increase the productivity/sq. mile by easily 10x if not more.

[QuakeIV]

Ya, that is 1 thing that annoys me about aurora. I understand you need to put a pop cap on a planet, but earth is capable of supporting 10s to 100s of times more population then the cap in game.

Just to give you an idea, We could fit the entire population of the USA and Canada into the state of New York and still have about 20% of the land area of that state left unpopulated if we lived at New York City levels of population density. New Jersey is the most densely populated state in the US (1,200 per sq. Mile). We could fit the entire US population in the state of Texas and still have room at that density. And we could fit the world population in the area of the US (including Hawaii & Alaska) and China leaving the rest of the world 100% devoid of human life.

The biggest use of land is agriculture. Roughly 1.43 mil sq. miles of the US is farm land and that can support roughly 570,000,000 people. But were talking about a game where we can feed 10s of millions if not 100s on a planet with no atmosphere, meaning we would have to have extensive aeroponics and hydroponics infrastructure which would increase the productivity/sq. mile by easily 10x if not more.

This is true.

[Density]

so was thinking about something, Population Capacity is defined as the Capacity of a population giving its current Food, Water and other Necessities usage and production, given that humans (and im going to assume other Sapient and industrial creatures) can change the carrying capacity by more efficient farming methods and other environmental things id like to propose the idea of a research that increases the Max population of a planet to represent things like conventional orbital industry, improvements in Farming tech based on the TN mats, and improved energy production also based on the discovery of the TNs,

I've been thinking for a while that it'd be cool to have a pop density tech line and a growth rate tech line to bulk out Bio/Gen.

[Droll]

It would also allow the hydrosphere to potentially play a bigger role in carrying capacity as well. Species could have a minimum hydro for colony cost but also an ideal hydro for the purposes of carrying capacity.

This would also allow for aquatic species to become a thing more easily (IIRC there was an entire thread about this).

[nuclearslurpee]

Kind of a random thought I had earlier today when looking at medals, and some of the conditions - it felt like it would be better if some of the medals could be assigned to the ship instead.   Not sure of the work required, but it would be interesting to grant decorations to the ship instead of officers crewing it, or even just the ability to add notes to a ship.

On this note, it would also be nice if conditional medals were assigned to all ships in a fleet which accomplished some task, not just the "first ship" in the fleet. Example of this: "Discover N Star Systems" is awarded to only one officer even if a whole fleet jumped into the system to do a survey. This should be awarded not only to commanding officers of all ships but also any sub-commanding officers. Similarly, medals for destroying N tons should be awarded to sub-command officers - which would make the higher conditions more achievable and commander careers as told by medals more interesting.

[ArcWolf]

Kind of a random thought I had earlier today when looking at medals, and some of the conditions - it felt like it would be better if some of the medals could be assigned to the ship instead.   Not sure of the work required, but it would be interesting to grant decorations to the ship instead of officers crewing it, or even just the ability to add notes to a ship.

On this note, it would also be nice if conditional medals were assigned to all ships in a fleet which accomplished some task, not just the "first ship" in the fleet. Example of this: "Discover N Star Systems" is awarded to only one officer even if a whole fleet jumped into the system to do a survey. This should be awarded not only to commanding officers of all ships but also any sub-commanding officers. Similarly, medals for destroying N tons should be awarded to sub-command officers - which would make the higher conditions more achievable and commander careers as told by medals more interesting.

Agreed, i would also like to add having ground commanders in the command hierarch get some form of recognition for tonnage destroyed. My LTG leading the invasion is going to stay in the Rear echelon and probably have 0 kills during the combat, but they are heading the army, and if that army destroys some 1mil tons, he should get some credit other then the campaign ribbon i make and award to all officers involved.