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Posted by: Rastaman
« on: April 12, 2011, 08:01:38 AM »

The #### reference is also flawed in the sense that the victims did indeed wait in line to be massacred, even though in general they knew what that waiting line was all about. The reasons for this are not really understood to this day. The founders of modern Israel were very aware of this, didn't want it to repeat itself, which is why they armed themselves to the teeth with all the contemporary consequences.

Other species might handle it differently of course. But that's why you can gas them wholesale with carbon monoxide, SS Einsatzgruppen style. But that reference is also flawed because this is space fantasy in 2011, and the SS didn't know nothing about terraforming. #### references seem to be flawed always, damn.
Posted by: Charlie Beeler
« on: April 12, 2011, 07:25:00 AM »

Quote from: sloanjh on April 11, 2011, 09:21:34 PM
I suspect he accidentally hit the "Modify" button instead of "Quote".  I've done that in the past....  :-[

John

Not quite sure what happened there....fixed.
Posted by: sloanjh
« on: April 11, 2011, 09:21:34 PM »

Quote from: Shadow on April 11, 2011, 04:58:42 PM
Steve possession! :o

I suspect he accidentally hit the "Modify" button instead of "Quote".  I've done that in the past....  :-[

John
Posted by: Shadow
« on: April 11, 2011, 04:58:42 PM »

Quote from: Charlie Beeler on April 11, 2011, 01:37:49 PM
I meant keeping it a secret from the other six billion you intend to kill. Once they find out, they aren't going to calmly wait their turn to be massacred.

Steve

Steve possession! :o
Posted by: Thiosk
« on: April 11, 2011, 04:56:26 PM »

Hamburger factories!

Produces a trade good that lowers the requirement for agricultural worlds on other planets.  Costs pop.  A lot of pop.
Posted by: Charlie Beeler
« on: April 11, 2011, 01:37:49 PM »

Quote
I meant keeping it a secret from the other six billion you intend to kill. Once they find out, they aren't going to calmly wait their turn to be massacred.

Steve


And I also feel that the #### reference is flawed.  A properly xenophobic race would have no reason to try to hide the genocide from it's own racial population.
Posted by: Sheb
« on: April 11, 2011, 01:21:24 PM »

Right, I've got hundreds of millions of useless workers. :p
Posted by: Steve Walmsley
« on: April 11, 2011, 01:11:50 PM »

Quote from: EarthquakeDamage on April 10, 2011, 12:56:35 PM
I don't see why anyone gives a damn how easy it is to genocide a population.  There is no GFFP in Aurora because, as jseah noted, population growth is your primary limiting factor (so long as you get past any early mineral crunches, which must be true if you're off conquering planets).  Genocide almost completely neuters growth by conquest.  Don't forget that generated NPR populations scale with your total population, so each new homeworld you conquer substantially increases your total pop.

While pop growth might be a limiting factor in some campaigns, there are many others where you have plenty of population and suffer constraints in other areas.

Steve
Posted by: Steve Walmsley
« on: April 11, 2011, 01:10:30 PM »

I have thought about having ground troops be able to attempt to kill off a population. This isn't as straightforward as it sounds though. Firstly, the population might resist and form some type of poorly-armed militia, although based on Earth history this isn't necessarily certain. Secondly, it would be a huge undertaking. The Holocaust is the prime example of an industrialized society attempting to do this. Putting aside for a moment the abhorrent nature of the attempt and looking at the logistics, the ####s apparently believed that their own troops would simply not be capable of simply shooting so many people, for both logistical reasons and because of the psychological effect on those troops. Eventually they turned to what was really industrialized genocide, rather than military-led genocide. Also, even though the holocaust is generally regarded as the worst crime in human history and killing six million people is almost unimaginable, that is only a tiny fraction of an entire planetary population. Can you imagine trying to wipe out six billion people and keep it a secret to avoid massive resistance?

If you really wanted to kill the population then you really need WMD, which means nuclear, biological or chemical. In this case nuclear means collateral damage, chemical is probably the terraforming option and biological isn't in the game yet, although it will be at some point. In summary, getting your troops to simply kill everyone is probably the most difficult option and I doubt it could be done in reality.

Steve
Posted by: Shadow
« on: April 11, 2011, 12:49:43 PM »

Easy. Have the ground troops' xenocidal effectiveness be positively modified by their race's Xenophobia. :P

And it needn't be an NPR-exclusive option. Not everyone plays a goody two-shoes race. Who says we can't play hivemind or machine species ourselves?
Posted by: Charlie Beeler
« on: April 11, 2011, 11:11:47 AM »

To be brutally honest,  the ability to turn ground troops against a population should be an option... for a race that is xenophobic.  Not really for a player race.  But I can easily see this for the hivemind and machine races like we had in Starfire.  The real problem with implementing this is that Steve does not have the AI and the deplomacy rules advanced enough to support this kind of variation in NPR behavior.
Posted by: EarthquakeDamage
« on: April 10, 2011, 12:56:35 PM »

I don't see why anyone gives a damn how easy it is to genocide a population.  There is no GFFP in Aurora because, as jseah noted, population growth is your primary limiting factor (so long as you get past any early mineral crunches, which must be true if you're off conquering planets).  Genocide almost completely neuters growth by conquest.  Don't forget that generated NPR populations scale with your total population, so each new homeworld you conquer substantially increases your total pop.
Posted by: Narmio
« on: April 08, 2011, 08:23:32 PM »

Eh, I don't see the attraction in killing them all.  Bombing any military installations into glass, installing a puppet government propped up by a police state and then shipping everything of value off-world is my preferred solution. Essentially you reduce the aliens to pre-TN tech and keep them there. I'd understand why you might want to eradicate them if you're RPing a "filthy xenos must die" empire, but otherwise the rational decision is always subjugate-and-tax.

If there were population limits on planets, and therefore colonisable real-estate was at a real premium, I might consider wiping out a population to put humans there instead.
Posted by: sloanjh
« on: April 08, 2011, 08:35:55 AM »

Quote from: Charlie Beeler on April 08, 2011, 07:08:08 AM
A little background.  Keep in mind that I'm trying to recall mailing list conversations from several years ago so the I'm probably going to have the details wrong.

When Steve was starting Aurora the base mailing list were diehard Starfire 3rdR players for the most part.  One of the things that had always been considered an imbalance was planetary conquest.  It was way to easy and profitable.  Don't get me wrong, most of us used variations on GFFP to further our Imperial expansion goals, it was still considered gaming the system.  The agreed upon goal for Aurora was that orbital bombardment for the purpose of genocide should have major negative benefits to future use. 

Out of those discussions it was determined that planetary invasion by ground troops was the preferred method of planetary conquest.  It helped that this was Steves' preferred method as well.  The result is that you can "bomb" a population into submission and have a planet your people don't want to live on, or invade and garrisson and have a useful planet and an increase (eventually) in imperial population for workforce and tax base.
Thanks Charlie - this is what I was sort of remembering in my last post.  My "smacks of GFFP" comment was trying to say that using your ground troops to wipe them out after you've already conquered them might push things back into the "way too easy" category, even though you're using ground troops.  It should be hard to wipe out a planetary population - especially if it's a planetary population of cockroaches :-)

John
Posted by: jseah
« on: April 08, 2011, 08:28:17 AM »

In fact, I think the GFFP solution is already massively discouraged due to the time it takes to expand your economy. 

A major limiting factor for expansion is population.  I can build construction factories and research labs and components for ships faster than my population grows to support that expansion. 
 - 25bp per CF tech and a 50% governor + 45% sector governor bonus = 2.85 years construction doubling time = 35% annual construction growth (splitting equally between CF, mines and labs gives you 11.6% growth = 23.4% growth that requires population)
 - Maximum population growth is 10% for smallest populations, around 2% after bonuses for capital planets.  Your population growth *always* loses. 
 - Therefore you have roughly 20% of your production base growth unused because your populations can't grow fast enough. 
   - And this already assumes you have a large proportion of your population in the high growth 25mil colonies.  Which can't do anything effectively except mine.  (and if you're going for population growth, you need lots of colonies, which is difficult to find, much less find on planets with minerals worth extracting)

Integrating a second homeworld size population, with their attendant facilities, production and research, effectively increases your production base one fold. 
I would normally use GFFP in most 4Xs, simply because I cannot spare the attention span needed to build troops, transport, and invade.  And then deal with subsequent uprisings and other problems.  In Aurora, this is easy since your attention span is effectively as much as you want.