I've stumbled across the planned feature of colonization pressure for v2.6.0 after the fact.
I'm unsure how this feature will work out in practice and if my suggestion might contradict or at least undermine it.
Please feel free to critize my suggestion and to point out any flaws or inconsistencies.
Also, please disregard this suggestion if someone has already put forward a similar idea.
I have searched the forum for this type of suggestion, but not thoroughly.
An example to illustrate:
In the early game, I have colonized Mars to mine it for the few minerals it had.
Later on, I fully terraformed it (CC=0), but since I had mined all minerals already, I have stripped all installations except for some financial centres, to give the local population something to do while growing workers for my empire.
As Mars has a relatively high population capacity and I don't really have a use for hundreds of millions of financial workers, I would like to redistribute the surplus workforce.
However, the civilian shipping lines strip Mars bare of any colonists like a swarm of locusts if I ever dare to set is as 'source of colonists' in the economics tab.
That's because I have a number of other colonized and terraformed worlds set as destinations, which also have a high population capacity.
In one extreme case, a system with multiple colonies (all of which were fully terraformed) was stripped bare, resulting in the transport of over a billion people in a relatively short window of time, because I've temporarily set one terraformed colony with high capacity as destination, because I wanted 10m extra workers.
That of course automatically set all the now empty colonies as destinations as well. You can guess how well that went.
As far as I am aware, colony ships using the standing order of unloading colonists take the maximum supported colony size of a target colony into account, but they don't take the worker requirement of the source colony into consideration.
In practice, I therefore either have to carefully cycle between stable and source for any colonies with surplus workforce - which is a bit difficult, because there's no telling when the swarm will show up in force to 'abduct' the population.
Or I have to set the colony to stable, establish a manual transport route using my own colony ships and a rough estimation of the total population growth to transport the colonists to a larger core planet which I then use as a colonist source to better keep an eye on the development.
This has got me thinking about a potential (and hopefully minor) change to the standing order for loading colonists.
This is what I came up with:
Colony set to destination
No change, colonists pile in like there's no tomorrow - until the supported max. population is reached.
Colony set to stable
No change, nobody gets in or out.
Colony set to source
Civilian shipping lines remove colonists, as long as there's available workers in the colony and there is at least one colony destination with enough capacity available.
Once enough colonists have been removed so that there are no surplus workers, no more colonists are transported off, unless either the population increases to a level of surplus workers or installations are removed and the worker requirement drops to a low enough level.
If a colony which is set to source receives more installations than its workforce contingent can sustain, it will basically be treated as if it was set to stable, until the population growth has caught up to the available jobs.
This is to simulate that population which is unemployed (insufficient A&E, SI or government jobs) will look for new opportunites elsewhere but won't board a colony ship to spend months or years in space if there are jobs available locally.
In practice, this should prevent important and productive colonies (mining/construction/shipbuilding colonies etc.) from being plundered empty and the local economy coming to a screeching halt because the civilian colony ships thought it more useful to dump all your productive workers on a colony with too few installations so your potential workers can twiddle their thumbs instead of being productive.
Keep in mind that this is not exactly ideal, as both loading and unloading will perform a corresponding check of available colonies and their capacity, which will increase computational overhead and exacerbate the game slowdown problem caused by civilian shipping.
Suggestions for improvement by someone with way more experience in programming would be highly appreciated.
So, what do you think of this idea?
