Aurora 4x
New Players => The Academy => Topic started by: Krictic on September 26, 2015, 07:27:55 PM
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What would be the minimum needed population start to play (even if extremely slowly), i have an idea for a low population colony starting its own empire (conventional start), what would be the strictly minimum of pop i would need?
I ask because once i tried to start a game with 1 mil pop and discovered i had no ground mines and i don´t want to keep starting new games just to test it.
Thanks.
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You can give any population you want, but you'd need to go in after with SM mode and add the necessary facilities. Just remember that your efficiency will be very very low.
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I think it depends just how slowly you are willing to play...
So suppose you had an ideal habitable world with all minerals, and your colony on this planet has 0.0002m pop (one emergency cyro's worth of colonists) with exactly one construction facility and a stockpile of the minerals required to construct one mine. Since you can't have fractions of installations, this is effectively the slowest start you can get from the starting installations aspect assuming a Trans-Newtonian start. I think conventional industry counts as a cross between a construction facility and a mine but has a lower efficiency compared to the TN equivalents, so you could conceivably start with one of those instead and no starting mineral stockpile.
Strictly speaking, the absolute minimum pop should be whatever is the smallest number Aurora can handle - try experimenting around with SM to find the smallest starting population that doesn't simply register as zero. Even if you don't have enough workers to man your installations at the beginning, you can just wait for population growth to do its thing.
I can't remember exactly what the manpower requirements for each facility/mine is, but they should still function (albeit at reduced efficiency) even when you have a worker shortage.
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I think it depends just how slowly you are willing to play...
So suppose you had an ideal habitable world with all minerals, and your colony on this planet has 0.0002m pop (one emergency cyro's worth of colonists) with exactly one construction facility and a stockpile of the minerals required to construct one mine. Since you can't have fractions of installations, this is effectively the slowest start you can get from the starting installations aspect assuming a Trans-Newtonian start. I think conventional industry counts as a cross between a construction facility and a mine but has a lower efficiency compared to the TN equivalents, so you could conceivably start with one of those instead and no starting mineral stockpile.
Strictly speaking, the absolute minimum pop should be whatever is the smallest number Aurora can handle - try experimenting around with SM to find the smallest starting population that doesn't simply register as zero. Even if you don't have enough workers to man your installations at the beginning, you can just wait for population growth to do its thing.
I can't remember exactly what the manpower requirements for each facility/mine is, but they should still function (albeit at reduced efficiency) even when you have a worker shortage.
Thanks man.
Im testing he scenario now (im planning to write an AAR if i can manage), but because im starting a colony i had to start on SM Mode to create the system myself, because its not on sol.
Another question, is it possible to make more than one empire on the same planet? i was thinking of multiple colonial factions.
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Indeed it is; the command to add another empire onto a specific system body should be visible in the "system generation and display" screen if you have SM active (the icon that looks like a sun on your system map), just select the same planet as your colony is on.
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Indeed it is; the command to add another empire onto a specific system body should be visible in the "system generation and display" screen if you have SM active (the icon that looks like a sun on your system map), just select the same planet as your colony is on.
But how does it work? what happens when the populatiosn grow too large? isit possible to unite them diplomatically or only by war? another thing, how do i set these factions as NPR? or is it only possible to add player races?
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You probably wouldn't want to start with much less than 100 million, otherwise your productivity will be pretty bad, but keep in mind that heavily populated ideal planets only employ 20% in production, as I recall 100 million population should be more like 50% as there's significantly less service industry.
I have run scenarios starting with 10-20 million pop inside massive freighters, initial construction was with construction brigades which are far more efficient to transport then factories. Initial mining was from asteroids and comets, likewise fuel was harvested to save on employment, and even then I had to shutdown either the shipyards or research centers to get full production. Once again splitting the population up allowed greater production, but keep in mind that each point higher of colony cost requires an additional 5% of your population employed in agriculture ( which I assume includes life support etc.)
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You probably wouldn't want to start with much less than 100 million, otherwise your productivity will be pretty bad, but keep in mind that heavily populated ideal planets only employ 20% in production, as I recall 100 million population should be more like 50% as there's significantly less service industry.
I have run scenarios starting with 10-20 million pop inside massive freighters, initial construction was with construction brigades which are far more efficient to transport then factories. Initial mining was from asteroids and comets, likewise fuel was harvested to save on employment, and even then I had to shutdown either the shipyards or research centers to get full production. Once again splitting the population up allowed greater production, but keep in mind that each point higher of colony cost requires an additional 5% of your population employed in agriculture ( which I assume includes life support etc.)
This would be against the lore im building, i don´t want to give spoilers, but they were refugees from the fall of their once-great civilization, they spent centuries in a single Generation Ship, with less than a million colonists and a few basic facilities, then once on the planet, they dismounted their ship and got the resources to jumpstart their new colony.
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Last I checked when messing around. You can have .001m pop on a planet and it will grow... slowly. Ofcourse with this number you cant even run a single conventional industry let alone a factory. And at only 10% growth per year, itlly take quite a while before it becomes viable.
Compound on this though, the real limitation to this. Wealth. This tiny pop wont be generating too much wealth at all, nor will they even slightly be able to support the wealth demands of a research facility, and will instead need to do research in short bursts every few years.
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Last I checked when messing around. You can have .001m pop on a planet and it will grow... slowly. Ofcourse with this number you cant even run a single conventional industry let alone a factory. And at only 10% growth per year, itlly take quite a while before it becomes viable.
Compound on this though, the real limitation to this. Wealth. This tiny pop wont be generating too much wealth at all, nor will they even slightly be able to support the wealth demands of a research facility, and will instead need to do research in short bursts every few years.
Even then, i think its good enough, i can adjust for such inconveniences in time. :v
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With less than a million pop you'll want all your construction to be brigades, you'll actually expand production faster making training centers and constantly making more con brigades. They don't need pop to run which is the big advantage. I would suggest using asteroid miners for minerals, maybe even orbital habitat platforms so you won't need population for shipyards. Maybe you should start with a high construction research to balance things out.
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With less than a million pop you'll want all your construction to be brigades, you'll actually expand production faster making training centers and constantly making more con brigades. They don't need pop to run which is the big advantage. I would suggest using asteroid miners for minerals, maybe even orbital habitat platforms so you won't need population for shipyards. Maybe you should start with a high construction research to balance things out.
Thanks for the advice, i will try to follow them later today
What about the idea of placing more than one empire in a single planet, is it viable? they would need to be NPR, is that possible?
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I'm running 5 NPRs on earth at the moment, it's kind of slow going but that gives me time to read through the fiction forum.
Note that running multiple empires might actually be faster if you control them all yourself, or at least from a story perspective it gives you better insight into the other empires. I have no idea what's going on in china, Russia, America, the Middle East, or India, except that they have a lot more ships than I do.
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Moved to The Academy.
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Moved to The Academy.
Can you explain to me exactly what goes to the Academy and what goes to Mechanics forum? i feel a bit lost.
I'm running 5 NPRs on earth at the moment, it's kind of slow going but that gives me time to read through the fiction forum.
Note that running multiple empires might actually be faster if you control them all yourself, or at least from a story perspective it gives you better insight into the other empires. I have no idea what's going on in china, Russia, America, the Middle East, or India, except that they have a lot more ships than I do.
And there was i thinking about adding 12 factions, lol
Anyways, it must be NPR anyway, i do not have an specific story in mind, it will be the story of one of those colonial factions strugling to survive on this planet after the fall of their civilization, think of Alpha Centauri, but without all the gaia-theory story elements, just a single, geopolitical struggle that can (and almost centainly will) escalate to stellar proportions. :v
You said it was slow playing NPRs on the planet, then i will add just a few factions then, it will help me, because i will have less background to cover.
Finally, another question: there is an upper limit of population that a single planet can support?
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Can you explain to me exactly what goes to the Academy and what goes to Mechanics forum? i feel a bit lost.
And there was i thinking about adding 12 factions, lol
Anyways, it must be NPR anyway, i do not have an specific story in mind, it will be the story of one of those colonial factions strugling to survive on this planet after the fall of their civilization, think of Alpha Centauri, but without all the gaia-theory story elements, just a single, geopolitical struggle that can (and almost centainly will) escalate to stellar proportions. :v
You said it was slow playing NPRs on the planet, then i will add just a few factions then, it will help me, because i will have less background to cover.
Finally, another question: there is an upper limit of population that a single planet can support?
Academy is basically the newby questions forum. Whereas mechanics is specifically for discussing the harder mechanics of the game. Although often they step on eachothers toes, and well it can be confusing. Basically the ship design ant tactic forums are specificalyl for discussing ship designs and their merits, and tactics though.
"Empires" there's no reason why you can't have 12 different empires on a single planet, all SM controlled. Ofcourse this is a bit of a clusterfrakk but gives some options for what to do. You just have to get adept at switching between the factions in menus and controlling them. Generally something you might try after you've got the basic mechanics of the game down.
As far as the "upper limit" of a planet.
If the planet has a colony cost of 0, its limitless AFAIK, just how long you want to let the pop expand.
If it has a colony cost, its limited by how much population can be supported by the infrastructure present. Now this is important in a few ways. 1 even if you don't have enough infrastructure to support it, civilian colony ships will often still bring colonists to the planet and cause "unrest" issues due to overpopulating. This can be stopped by say setting the colonists source to be destination. however that sucks if trying to build up a couple planets at a time.
Part of my personal thoughts on early colonization. In the opening stretch of the game I'll generally build a supply of infrastructure to plop on the moon supporting ~10-20million colonists. From there, a combination of terraforming and civilian infrastructure (colonies will slowly generate their own infrastructure, if its needed, and civilian transports will move it to where it is needed), by the time luna hits a colony cost in the 0.1-0.5 range, it generally has tens of thousands of infrastructure, that can now be shifted to other colonies as needed. Might take a numbe rof years to do this, but that initial nest egg of infrastructure I made early on, easily can make further expansion outside of Sol extremely easy.
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Academy is basically the newby questions forum. Whereas mechanics is specifically for discussing the harder mechanics of the game. Although often they step on eachothers toes, and well it can be confusing. Basically the ship design ant tactic forums are specificalyl for discussing ship designs and their merits, and tactics though.
"Empires" there's no reason why you can't have 12 different empires on a single planet, all SM controlled. Ofcourse this is a bit of a clusterfrakk but gives some options for what to do. You just have to get adept at switching between the factions in menus and controlling them. Generally something you might try after you've got the basic mechanics of the game down.
As far as the "upper limit" of a planet.
If the planet has a colony cost of 0, its limitless AFAIK, just how long you want to let the pop expand.
If it has a colony cost, its limited by how much population can be supported by the infrastructure present. Now this is important in a few ways. 1 even if you don't have enough infrastructure to support it, civilian colony ships will often still bring colonists to the planet and cause "unrest" issues due to overpopulating. This can be stopped by say setting the colonists source to be destination. however that sucks if trying to build up a couple planets at a time.
Part of my personal thoughts on early colonization. In the opening stretch of the game I'll generally build a supply of infrastructure to plop on the moon supporting ~10-20million colonists. From there, a combination of terraforming and civilian infrastructure (colonies will slowly generate their own infrastructure, if its needed, and civilian transports will move it to where it is needed), by the time luna hits a colony cost in the 0.1-0.5 range, it generally has tens of thousands of infrastructure, that can now be shifted to other colonies as needed. Might take a numbe rof years to do this, but that initial nest egg of infrastructure I made early on, easily can make further expansion outside of Sol extremely easy.
"If the planet has a colony cost of 0, its limitless AFAIK, just how long you want to let the pop expand."
Does this means there is a way to "halt" populational growth (without resorting to mass colonization?).
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Does this means there is a way to "halt" populational growth (without resorting to mass colonization?).
I find glassing the planet usually works :)
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I find glassing the planet usually works :)
What do you mean?
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Steve means destroying the planets ability to sustain life :s.
Anyhow, there is no limit to the population size a perfect planet can sustain , though growth does slow down significantly when it gets high.
I have a related question, but it's somewhat of a spoiler.
What are the requirements for a planet to be habitable to an NPR? At the moment I'm just searching every low cost planet; but I'm sure there's a better way.
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Steve means destroying the planets ability to sustain life :s.
Anyhow, there is no limit to the population size a perfect planet can sustain , though growth does slow down significantly when it gets high.
I have a related question, but it's somewhat of a spoiler.
What are the requirements for a planet to be habitable to an NPR? At the moment I'm just searching every low cost planet; but I'm sure there's a better way.
"Steve means destroying the planets ability to sustain life :s."
That´s too extreme.
I have a question also, if i set the NPR generation to a 100%, does that means every system i create (via SM) that have a suitable planet will have a NPR? or is it limited to generation through JP exploration?
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Steve means destroying the planets ability to sustain life :s.
Anyhow, there is no limit to the population size a perfect planet can sustain , though growth does slow down significantly when it gets high.
I have a related question, but it's somewhat of a spoiler.
What are the requirements for a planet to be habitable to an NPR? At the moment I'm just searching every low cost planet; but I'm sure there's a better way.
Do you mean habitable in terms of the chance of it being an NPR home world, or the range that an existing NPR would consider to be habitable?
Don't forget btw that NPR tolerance are different (depending on their home world and tolerance ranges) so they may colonise planets you consider uninhabitable
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A new NPR home world may be created during system generation if a planet falls within the following ranges:
Oxygen atm from 0.07 to 0.40
Surface Temperature from -40C to 60C
Gravity from 0.4G to 2.5G
No Dangerous Gases
The environmental tolerances of the NPR will then be set with their home world as ideal and a random range either side.
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There´s any way to edit the NPR stats after they are created? or do i need to create them as player races and then transform them into NPR, is this even possible?
Oh, and how do i add construction brigades on SM Mode?
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What about methane or ammonia breathers, I'll assume that oxygen can be swapped out for those, as long as either of the other toxic gasses aren't present?
There´s any way to edit the NPR stats after they are created? or do i need to create them as player races and then transform them into NPR, is this even possible?
Oh, and how do i add construction brigades on SM Mode?
I'm pretty sure you can't change them after you've created them, though there's 'space master options' on the intelligence window I can't access due to my resolution which may it may not be related.
You create NPRs in one of two ways, either under the spacemaster option on the main menu there is 'add extra NPR' which adds a new system somewhere with an NPR set up on a suitable planet, you can't edit this but it'll be created in the same way as any NPRs generated during system exploration, so further along the game it'll be larger and higher tech.
OR, under the system information window(f9) you can setup a new empire on any habitable world, that means any world which meets the requirements steve just listed, use the 'create empire button' then you get a window allowing modification of their name, theme, economy, tech points, etc, you can also change their max atmosphere pressure, gravity deviation, oxygen pressure deviation and temperature deviation.
Most importantly there's an option to create them as an NPR.
If you want to add a new empire to an unsuitable planet you'll first need to terraform that planet, create a colony there using a pre existing empire and use spacemaster options to modify the planet. Oh and you should use teh 'homeworld minerals' button to make sure they don't run out and die early.
Finally adding construction brigades first requires adding the tech for building them, then after turning on spacemaster mode, go to ground unit training, select the unit type you want then press the 'add unit' button.
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Can you explain to me exactly what goes to the Academy and what goes to Mechanics forum? i feel a bit lost.
No it's a bit blurry :) I think the best criterion though is probably that "How do I do X" questions should go to The Academy while "What is the rule for how Y works" should go to Mechanics.
The main thing here is that Mechanics is where Steve posts rules changes. More recently this has been in the change log threads, but in the past it was in new threads, so historically we've made an effort to minimize the number of new threads in Mechanics so that it was easier to find Steve's threads. In addition, in the past it's been the case that when someone opens a new thread in Mechanics then more new players see the thread and start posting their "How do I do X" questions there (instead of The Academy), which contributes to the blurring of the line between them.
John
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Except I just blurred the lines more by making steve post some mechanics here XD
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"Steve means destroying the planets ability to sustain life :s."
That´s too extreme.
Though quite easy to organise in one of Steves games, just put a Chinese colony there...
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Though quite easy to organise in one of Steves games, just put a Chinese colony there...
There is already a chinese colony on my AAR. xD
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Alternatively in my game china seems to be the strongest power, their greater pop seems to have allowed them to avoid a cash crunch like I have experienced and I'm sure the other powers are affected by, they seem to have the greatest tonnage in shipping too.
Actually, china may cause the death of everyone, they're upto their third gate building ship, I don't actually see them working anymore though, after gating sol I've lost track of them.
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Alternatively in my game china seems to be the strongest power, their greater pop seems to have allowed them to avoid a cash crunch like I have experienced and I'm sure the other powers are affected by, they seem to have the greatest tonnage in shipping too.
Actually, china may cause the death of everyone, they're upto their third gate building ship, I don't actually see them working anymore though, after gating sol I've lost track of them.
Population sure have quite the huge impact, indeed.
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I wish population had a bit less impact though.
You should be able to run a competitive nation that's much smaller but more advanced tech to compensate ( hard in aurora due to science being limited by tax = population and millions of workers = population again ).
It would be really cool if each field also had a tech for AI/automation efforts which reduce the amount of workers needed for factories/science labs/and so on.
Then advanced small pop societies could be more long term competitive to large pop less advanced ones.