4.3 Suggestions

[Steve Walmsley]

This came up as a side topic in my discussion of my first seven years:

Run a campaign that has populations which tolerate ultra-low gravity, i.e. which have a lower G limit of 0.0.  At the same time, introduce "mining companies" into the civilian sector who will produce mines and create populations on worlds with high mineral concentrations.

The current restrictions on small populated bodies are in for three reasons. Firstly, current research suggests it would be very difficult for a human population to exist long-term in a low gravity environment. Secondly, I used to hate the massive number of colonies in Starfire

Steve

[sloanjh (OP)]

I have had a few more thoughts on gravity and the tolerance thereof.

From the NASA hyper gravity experiments a planet with a gravity of 2g is probably too high to be a realistic colonisation target. So lets assume a colonist from Earth could colonise a planet with a gravity of 1.5g, accepting the lowered life expectancy etc. Thus as a starting point lets allow your race to be able to tolerate 0g to 1.5g with the optimum at 1g.

However matters then get complicated. While colonists from Earth could colonise Mars its doubtful whether colonists from Mars could colonise Earth or any other 1g planet. Since Mars has a gravity about a third that of the Earth your Martian colonists would have a maximum tolerance of approximately 0.5. While your colonists from the 1.5 g world could, after adapting (however long that may take) colonise a planet with a gravity of 2.25. Thus you end up with divergent populations with different g tolerances. In addition while the human body appears to adapt to low g environments quite rapidly it is likely to adapt to high g environments quite slowly over generations.

The end result for me is that in future games I will reduce my optimum g tolerance to 0.75-1.25 although this may still be too large a spread. I would still like to have the ability to colonise 0g environments but with an irreducible infrastructure requirement. Thus Mars would have an atmosphere penalty and a gravity penalty. With terraforming I can eliminate the former, but unless Steve introduces artificial gravity there is nothing to be done about the latter. So I would like the habitability index to consist of two numbers, one for the atmosphere and one for the gravity which sum to give the total habitability index. I am sure Steve could knock this off in an evening :wink:  .

Anyone have any other thoughts?

Regards

I like the idea of a skewed range.  Rather than colony cost, I would put an additive (as opposed to multiplicative) penalty on the growth rate, e.g. if your max G was 1.5, then at 2G you might have a -10%/year penalty on the growth rate (i.e. flat if there's no governor modifier) and -20%/year at 2.5G.  Or maybe it should be e.g. 5% at 0.1G over and double after that for each 0.1G.  Probably shouldn't be nearly as severe at the low end....

I would ignore the "different populations" effects - it's just too hard to track.  Hmmmm - except....

Should there be a MAJOR penalty for ground troops on high G (by their standards) worlds?

(Another thought after typing the pop penalty stuff above) - Maybe colonists being transplanted could have a "die-off" if they're landed on a world with signficantly heavier G.  So going from Mars to Earth might kill of 20% of the colonists....

My one concern about a permanent habitability cost for low G worlds (like Mars) is that there's no way to stop population growth, and eventually the population grows so much that the number of workers in the manufacturing sector goes to zero.  I would want a tweak to the mechanism so that I don't end up with e.g. 20M people on the moon who aren't producing anything before I would want to have a permanent terraforming cost.  Actually, I would like an adjustment to this anyway - something like a relative cut to the %devoted to manufacturing, rather than an absolute cut.  So you'd the number of workers available for mines on a cost 2 world might only be 90% of that of a cost 0 world; it might be 50% on cost 10 and 0% on cost 20 (the environment is so hostile that the colony can't do anything effective).

John

[Steve Walmsley]

As a result of the discussion on the difficulty in building a lot of mines, particularly automated mines, due to the reliance on Duranium, I have decided to change the mineral requirements to half Duranium and half Corundium. The latter mineral is only used for laser-based tech so this will increase the requirement for an under-used mineral and it fits well because the mining installation could quite easily rely on lasers for mining. While this doesn't reduce the build time or the overall cost, it will at least significantly reduce the reliance on Duranium.

Steve

[Steve Walmsley]

I have been looking further at civilian mining. My plan at the moment is to have civilian Mining Companies that function in much the same was as civilian Shipping LInes. They will start with a set amount of money and use it to build Civilian Mining Complexes. The locations they choose will probably be unpopulated bodies with good mineral deposits that are in the same system as a population of at least ten million. Once the colony is set up it will function just like any other population, except you will not receive the output of the CMCs unless you pay for it. The Mining Companies will allow the owning race to purchase mineral output from the mines by a simple on/off switch on the population they create. When the switch is set to 'Purchase Mineral Output', the minerals will either be placed in the population stockpile for the player race to pickup or they will be sent by mass driver to a location of the player's choice within the system. When the switch is set to 'Minerals go to Civilian Sector'. the minerals still disappear from the planetary deposits and are permanently lost (on the assumption that civilian industry is using them). In this latter case, the parent Race receives 50 wealth per year in taxation income per CMC.

Each Civilian Mining Complex is equivalent to ten automated mines and has a mass driver built in. It will cost the Mining Company 2500 wealth to create. At the moment, I plan to abstract the setting up so it will just appear at the designated location. As it is within the same system as a pop, I am assuming minor in-system traffic will be used. What I am struggling with at the moment is the hire cost. Assuming the Mining Company plans on a ten year return on investment, the annual hire cost would be 250 per complex. Assuming a racial mining output of say 16 tons, the player would receive up to 160 tons of each accessibility 1.0 mineral and smaller amounts of other minerals for his 250 wealth. The problem will be that at that rate of return, it will be ten years before a second mining complex is established so it will take a long time for the civilian mining sector to  grow to any appreciable size. There are several ways around this and I am open to comments on the best one.

1) Reduce the cost of the CMC while retaining the same hire cost. Not keen on this because the current build cost represents the same cost as 10 automated mines and a cut-down mass driver.
2) Increase annual rental. If the rental was say 500 per CMC, the ROI would be 5 years but it starts to get very expensive for the player.
3) Have a high chance of new mining companies forming. This wouldn't increase the rate at which a company created new CMCs but it would increase the number overall. Might get overrun with mining companies though
4) Assume the mining companies receive new investment on a regular basis based on their performance. In other words, if a mining company is showing a steady income, they may be able to borrow money to build the next complex or corporate investors may pump money into the company. In game terms, there would be a chance of new lump sums appearing in the company accounts based on their income. The drawback here is that the same should probably apply to Shipping Lines and I would prefer to leave them alone as they seem to be working OK.

Any other suggestions or comments welcome

Steve

[sloanjh (OP)]

I have been looking further at civilian mining. My plan at the moment is to have civilian Mining Companies that function in much the same was as civilian Shipping LInes.

[SNIP]

Any other suggestions or comments welcome

0) Cool!!

1)  Let's start with the simple suggestion I logged on to make ... Post a "civilian economy event" (same category as the existing "shipping line X has bought a ship" message) whenever a corporation forms or goes bankrupt.

2)  I've noticed that some of my shipping lines can go for years without shipping anything, and still go bankrupt.  I would recommend a fixed "run rate" charge on a corporations capital infrastructure (ships, CMCs, ....) - something like 5-10% of the initial cost.  That will drive companies into bankruptcy more quickly and avoid "zombie companies".  Don't know if you've got bankruptcy code in or not - I would suggest making the capital assets, possibly giving the player an opportunity to buy them first (i.e. the "the civilian sector is offering X for sale at Y").  Another possibility - put the assets up for sale and have them be snatched up when another company is looking to expand its business.

3)  If you go with the fixed run rate, then you might want to track profit/loss on a per installation (ship, CMC, ....) basis - if an asset loses money for e.g. 2 years the company should destroy it or offer it for sale.  This would be a way to get obsolete designs out of the civie sector.

4)  On mineral costs, how about trying to set a market price?  Here's my thoughts on a possible algorithm:

Give each population a demand for a fixed amount each mineral, equal to some factor times the population size times (break_even_accessibility - actual_accessibility) where break_even_accessibility (I was going to say 0.5, but I think you might want to go even lower e.g. 0.3 or 0.2) is a global constant for all populations and is the accessibility for which a minerals surplus/deficit is zero.  actual_accessibility would the the world's actual accessibility for that mineral - if it's bigger than break_even (i.e. negative answer for the demand) then that world is a producer of minerals, if it's less then that world is a consumer.  

 Add a MineralPrice table which assigns a price for each mineral at each population.  This is the price at which the world will buy that mineral.  Every year that demand is unmet this price grows at a rate proportional to the %unmet demand (e.g. doubling for 100% unmet); every year that demand is met the price falls.


Problem1: Inflation - you probably will need to find the most expensive commodity and rescale prices (but not cash balances) so that it always costs e.g. 2 wealth (or maybe even 5 or 10).  You should also probably have the initial cost and run rate of civie installations be based on their mineral requirements, so if it's Mercassium that's the most expensive mineral and Duranium is 10X cheaper, the run rate on CMC will be 10X lower than if Duranium were the price-setting mineral.

Problem2: Population Wealth - a tiny little colony shouldn't be able to produce endless amounts of cash and thereby jack the price of e.g. duranium up to infinity - this is another aspect of the inflation problem.  OTOH if prices are capped by the most expensive mineral this might not be a problem.  Another possibility for solution to the  would be to assign a fixed wealth/mineral (e.g. 10) beyond which the price can't go - this would represent the diminishing demand for the mineral as its price rises.  AHA!! Here's an idea - slow the growth/fall rate by the ratio of the price to 1.0.  So if the price were already at 5.0, then it would double every 5 years, as opposed to every year, on a world with 100% unmet demand and drop every 1/5th of a year on a world with met demand.

The buyer's price would control sales, but a seller wouldn't sell unless that price was better than its sell price (instead it would hold onto the minerals and let its sell price drop while buy prices went up).  A little trick I learned from the Communications of the ACM is to set the price equal to the

second highest buy price the seller can find - the idea is that it's essentially an auction between these two and the actor with the higher buy price will only bid enough to beat the 2nd place actor.

The military economy (player-controlled) could then have player-set buy and sell prices and demands for each population, which would bid against the civie populations (and each other!!).  This should maybe be set up as a range (max buy/min sell) and then allowed to float according to the market just like a civie population.

Note that the actual minerals would be moved around by civie freighters, just like civie commodities; this adds more things for shipping lines to do.
[/list]

You'll probably have better ideas on how to set up civie trade in minerals - the main intent of the above suggestions is to give a flavor of how prices might be able to float without going out of control.

5)  Allow both automated and non-automated CMC.  The non-automated should be 1/2 as expensive and 1/2 the run rate, but can only be installed on habitable worlds (which includes worlds which require infrastructure) and automatically open the world for colonization (i.e. they create a demand for colonists).  You might have to make the run rate more expensive for high infrastructure worlds, or you could base it on the %population available for manufacturing (which would also bias manned facilities towards the colonies and their cheap labor) - otherwise you'd end up putting manned CMC on e.g. Venus, with ridiculously high infrastructure costs.  Perhaps the initial cost of placing a manned CMC (which affects the run rate) should include the cost of infrastructure to support e.g. 0.25M pop.

That's all I can think of for now (and it's probably enough ).

John

[sloanjh (OP)]

As a result of the discussion on the difficulty in building a lot of mines, particularly automated mines, due to the reliance on Duranium, I have decided to change the mineral requirements to half Duranium and half Corundium. The latter mineral is only used for laser-based tech so this will increase the requirement for an under-used mineral and it fits well because the mining installation could quite easily rely on lasers for mining. While this doesn't reduce the build time or the overall cost, it will at least significantly reduce the reliance on Duranium.

Thanks Steve - I really like this solution.

John

[sloanjh (OP)]

Have a "Racial History" screen which displays a set of log messages (events) for a race, along with a timestamp.  I can think of several ways to add messages which would be nice:

1)  The obvious - a button on the history screen that pops up a text box.

2)  A button on various other screens that opens the same box - System map (F3) seems like a good one.

3)  A button on the population (F2) and possibly race (ctrl-F2) screen that will log a snapshot of the race's economy, i.e. population, #factories, # mines, ... either globally or on a per-population basis.  What I'm thinking of here are the annual "state of the race" reports that you and others put into your write-ups.

4)  An option to log the same information as in #3 on a particular date every year.  The reason for this is twofold - first so you don't have to remember to push the button every January 1st (those hangovers make one forgetful); second is that this could also be turned on for NPRs so that players could see what the NPRs were doing during the game, as can be done with the movie-replays in Civilization.

5)  This one's fuzzier (and probably bigger to code) - some sort of "battle report" button that could be pushed by the player.  The player would push the button and be prompted for a name (could default to e.g. "Nth Battle of SystemName" where N and SystemName are filled in by Aurora).  Aurora would then grab statistics for ship losses, crew losses, captures, etc. since some previous point in time - this could be done with "fog of war", i.e. a race would have exact knowledge of its own losses and that of the enemy which it captured, but (the player) would have to decide whether to mark contacts that have disappeared as destroyed, damaged (and perhaps heavy vs light), or disengaged.  Maybe Aurora could open a battle automatically when weapons are first launched or detected and prompt the player regularly as to whether the battle should be declared over (along with having a button to do so).  Note that you could also do the same thing for ground wars - this is easier to track automatically - it should just last as long as one party has ground troops in an offensive stance (attacking) another party.

I wanted the above tools for me , but realized that they might help you a lot for your big fiction-producing campaign (i.e. to keep track of the histories of all the various power blocks).  Note that the idea here is not to simply all the (tactical) events associated with a race - instead it's to record "strategic" events for the various races/empires.

John

[IanD]

John wrote
I would ignore the "different populations" effects - it's just too hard to track. Hmmmm - except....

Should there be a MAJOR penalty for ground troops on high G (by their standards) worlds?

I was thinking of Steves last campaign, where the population of Earth effectivily moved to Mars, which would mean that in a shoirt space of time the pop would have great difficulty in returning to Earth, look at how weak the Russian cosmonaut were who spent a year in orbit.

If you are trying to fight on a 1g world and you come from a 0.33g world, you are three times heavier, I think you can rule out foot patrols, the best you could come up with would be some form of augmented suit, so may be you should have to reseach "fighting on high grav planets" to be able to do it at all, and additionally suffer a steady loss of troops, think of the strain on the cardiovasculr system

John wrote
(Another thought after typing the pop penalty stuff above) - Maybe colonists being transplanted could have a "die-off" if they're landed on a world with signficantly heavier G. So going from Mars to Earth might kill of 20% of the colonists....

.

Not a bad idea.  Any colonists from a low grav planet are going to suffer much larger losses unless they can "acclimatise" somehow on the journey to their new home

Regards

[welchbloke]

I really like the concept of the CMC's.  My brain is too frazzled from night shifts to think about the hire costs, but I'll have a think and post my ideas if I think there worth discussing.

[Steve Walmsley]

1)  Let's start with the simple suggestion I logged on to make ... Post a "civilian economy event" (same category as the existing "shipping line X has bought a ship" message) whenever a corporation forms or goes bankrupt.

I have added a message for the formation of new shipping lines

2)  I've noticed that some of my shipping lines can go for years without shipping anything, and still go bankrupt.  I would recommend a fixed "run rate" charge on a corporations capital infrastructure (ships, CMCs, ....) - something like 5-10% of the initial cost.  That will drive companies into bankruptcy more quickly and avoid "zombie companies".  Don't know if you've got bankruptcy code in or not - I would suggest making the capital assets, possibly giving the player an opportunity to buy them first (i.e. the "the civilian sector is offering X for sale at Y").  Another possibility - put the assets up for sale and have them be snatched up when another company is looking to expand its business.

That shouldn't really happen in the latest versions. The max dividend was reduced to half of the wealth balance so even if a shipping line is not making any runs for a while, it should still survive. However, I have considered allowing the balance to fall below zero and in that case the best solution would be, as you suggest, to put its ships up for sale so that the player or other shipping lines could but them.

3)  If you go with the fixed run rate, then you might want to track profit/loss on a per installation (ship, CMC, ....) basis - if an asset loses money for e.g. 2 years the company should destroy it or offer it for sale.  This would be a way to get obsolete designs out of the civie sector.

I did have running costs in an earlier version of the shipping lines but eventually removed it. Partly because a problem arises if all the shipping lines can deal with far off colonies (the extra costs can run them out of money due to the lack of income) and partly because player freighters don't require maintenance. I assume that fuel costs are factored into the charges made by the shipping lines.

[4)  On mineral costs, how about trying to set a market price?  Here's my thoughts on a possible algorithm: (snip)

5)  Allow both automated and non-automated CMC.  The non-automated should be 1/2 as expensive and 1/2 the run rate, but can only be installed on habitable worlds (which includes worlds which require infrastructure) and automatically open the world for colonization (i.e. they create a demand for colonists).  You might have to make the run rate more expensive for high infrastructure worlds, or you could base it on the %population available for manufacturing (which would also bias manned facilities towards the colonies and their cheap labor) - otherwise you'd end up putting manned CMC on e.g. Venus, with ridiculously high infrastructure costs.  Perhaps the initial cost of placing a manned CMC (which affects the run rate) should include the cost of infrastructure to support e.g. 0.25M pop.

After playing around further with the Mining Companies idea, I have decided to adopt a fairly simple approach to start with. The Shipping Lines evolved from earlier, simpler versions of civilian shipping and I am at that very early stage now with civilian mining. Rather than try to get something complex working first time, I have added a basic version and will play with it after I get some playtest reports.

There won't be individual mining companies (at least for now) - there will just be a civilian mining colonies. The CMCs still exist and the mechanics are still as described in my earlier post. In brief:

1) Each Civilian Mining Complex is equivalent to ten automated mines and has a mass driver built in.

2) The parent race can purchase mineral output from the mines by a simple on/off switch on the population created by the civilians. When the switch is set to 'Purchase Mineral Output', the minerals will either be placed in the population stockpile for the player race to pickup or they will be sent by mass driver to a location of the player's choice within the system. When the switch is set to 'Minerals go to Civilian Sector' the minerals still disappear from the planetary deposits and are permanently lost (on the assumption that civilian industry is using them).

3) The annual purchase cost for the entire output of a CMC is 250 wealth. Assuming a racial mining output of say 16 tons, the player would receive up to 160 tons of each accessibility 1.0 mineral and smaller amounts of other minerals for his 250 wealth.

4) If the output from a colony is not purchased by the player, he will instead receive 50 wealth per year in taxation income per CMC.

What has changed from my earlier post is the way that the civilian mining colonies are created. Each 5-day increment a random number is generated between 1 and 1 million. If that number is lower than the annual racial income, a new mining colony will be created. This is based on the assumption that the racial income reflects the size of the civilian economy and is therefore will serve as a reasonable method of determiing the liklehood of new mining colonies being established. If a colony is established, the first step is to determine the system in which the new colony will be located. This is done by listing the populations of the Empire greater than ten million in size in descending order of population size and working through the list. As each pop is checked, there is a 50% chance that the system in which that pop is located will be selected, at which point the system selection is complete. Obviously this favours the systems in which larger pops are located. If the entire list is checked and no pop is selected, the system in which the largest pop is located will be used.

Once the system is selected, the program looks for suitable surveyed system bodies without an existing colony orbiting the same star as the selected population with an orbital distance no greater than 80 AU. On the first run through, the program checks for those system bodies which have either 25,000 tons of Duranium or 25,000 tons of Sorium at an accessibility of 0.8 or greater. Once those are found, the program works out the total mineral deposits for each world, multiplying the total tonnage of each deposit by its accessibility and ignoring any with an accessibility less than 0.5. The world with the greatest total tonnage is selected. If none are found that meet the criteria, a second check is made using 15,000 tons of Duranium or Sorium at an accessibility of 0.7 or greater. If worlds within these criteria are found, the total tonnage check is performed again to select one.

When the mining colony is created, it has 1-3 CMC, a deep space tracking station and a single Garrison division named after the system body.

In addition to the check for new mining colonies, all existing colonies are checked during each 5-day increment and there is a chance they will be expanded by adding one extra CMC. At the moment the check is the same 1-1,000,000 as the new colonies but I might increase that number depending on playtest.

While this is not as detailed as the shipping lines, it will increase the minerals available to the player if he is prepared to pay for them, increase the number of colonies to protect and perhaps create those colonies on some worlds that the player might not have considered. In my own game during playtest of the new code, the civilians created a mining colony on the Moon, which has 320,000 tons of accessibility 1.0 Duranium and 950,000 tons of 0.7 Tritanium. One of Neptune's moons is actually a better mining target but already has a colony.

I am quite happy to refine the selection criteria for the colony locations if anyone can suggest a better apporach.

Steve

[Steve Walmsley]

I was thinking of Steves last campaign, where the population of Earth effectivily moved to Mars, which would mean that in a shoirt space of time the pop would have great difficulty in returning to Earth, look at how weak the Russian cosmonaut were who spent a year in orbit.

(Another thought after typing the pop penalty stuff above) - Maybe colonists being transplanted could have a "die-off" if they're landed on a world with signficantly heavier G. So going from Mars to Earth might kill of 20% of the colonists....

.
This a potential can of worms . If I started getting into this in a serious way, you would have to eventually start treating colonists who landed on a world considerably different to the homeworld (or at least their descendants) to be a different species for purposes of colonization. Also, how would you differentiate between recently-arrived colonists and the descendants of those who had been there for decades. This is more detailed/complex than I would really want to get into. I think the easiest way is to treat all members of the same species as having the same tolerances, even if they were born on a different planet.

Steve

[sloanjh (OP)]

This a potential can of worms . If I started getting into this in a serious way, you would have to eventually start treating colonists who landed on a world considerably different to the homeworld (or at least their descendants) to be a different species for purposes of colonization. Also, how would you differentiate between recently-arrived colonists and the descendants of those who had been there for decades. This is more detailed/complex than I would really want to get into. I think the easiest way is to treat all members of the same species as having the same tolerances, even if they were born on a different planet.

I agree with the can of worms comment.  The die-off idea was an attempt to abstract it away so you wouldn't need to keep detailed histories etc. - it was simply that a colony ship would "remember" the gravity of the last population it loaded - if it offloaded at a planet with a significantly greater gravity (e.g. 2x or more) then you'd get a die-off percentage.  OTOH, the added realism probably isn't worth the coding....

John

[ShadoCat]

Some form of civilian mining operation is a possibility. I can see several ways to handle this. The civs could build asteroid mining ships, which already exist in the game. I could add some form of orbital colony that would provide manpower to the planet around which it orbited - this would work for both civilians and player-controlled colonies. Maybe I could add artifical gravity as a tech and you would need both infrastructure and 'gravity plating'.

I've long wanted to see a 4x game with O'Neil colonies.  I just don't see how useful they would be in the game.  Once built, they would be self sufficient and could hold any environment you choose to build in it.  A civilian version could be built with conventional tech (no TN).  However, it's movement would start very slow (~.1G acceleration).  In order to have a more mobile colony, you would need TN engines and a Duranium structure (to keep it from crumpling like an empty beer can when the engines start).  I would say that a conventional colony would not even be able to be towed at TN speeds.

Since a conventional O'Neil colony would would neither consume nor produce resources, they are simply a way of holding population.  This isn't generally an issue in Aurora since population shortages are the norm.  Though it might be a temporary solution for a race that has nowhere else to go.  They could also be built in an asteroid field and then provide a semi mobile population source that can roam from asteroid to asteroid in the filed.

This might be tricky to manage. I guess one way would be for a colony to be flagged as civilian and any minerals it mined would normally simply vanish into the ether. The player (or maybe any friendly race) could bid for minerals by selecting a cost they will pay per ton. The race with the highest bid would get the minerals. In fact, flagging the colony as civilian might get complicated if the player adds his own installations to the planet. Perhaps instead there is a new installation called Civilian Mining Complex. The civilians (Mining Companies?) would build these on existing colonies and maybe setup new colonies. The complexes remove minerals from the planet but those minerals only appear in your stockpiles if you pay for them. Rather than bidding, perhaps a flat fee per ton would be easier, or even easier a flat fee per complex which would avoid the complexity of sorting out which types of minerals you want and don't want.

So to summarise my ramblings. Civilian Mining Companies (CMC) build Civilian Mining Complexes (CMX). These are similar to automated mines and don't require supporting manpower. The CMC will build their CMX on existing colonies or they will set up new colonies where appropriate, including small low-grav bodies. The CMX will mine at a rate to be determined and the minerals from vanish from the planet's reserves as they are mined. You will have the option to 'hire' the CMX at an annual fee to be determined and in that case, its output appears at the colony for you to collect. Or as an added bonus, the CMX could be large installations equivalent to several AMs plus a mass driver and they will shoot the minerals to anywhere in the same system for no extra charge. How does that sound?

My issue with this is that I can't see a government allowing a strategic resource like TN minerals to be controlled by civilians.  I can see hiring civilian companies as contractors to mine asteroids or other worlds that are too expensive to colonize.  The cost of hiring civilians should be set at a point where circumstances dictate whether it is cheaper to invest in an automated mine or hire the civilians.  Maybe be a bit slime ball about it and let the civilians find and mine locations for you until you decide that the site is good enough to drop automated mines....

[sloanjh (OP)]

This came up as a side topic in my discussion of my first seven years:

Run a campaign that has populations which tolerate ultra-low gravity, i.e. which have a lower G limit of 0.0.  At the same time, introduce "mining companies" into the civilian sector who will produce mines and create populations on worlds with high mineral concentrations.

The current restrictions on small populated bodies are in for three reasons. Firstly, current research suggests it would be very difficult for a human population to exist long-term in a low gravity environment. Secondly, I used to hate the massive number of colonies in Starfire :-)

My main driver for this suggestion was SF.  Mostly, I'd like to see lunar colonies, but I also like to think of e.g. Niven's Belter culture.  I even would like to see orbital constructs that aren't tied to a body, i.e. the O'Neil colonies mentioned by ShadoCat.  I understand your Starfire frustration - what I like about the way that Aurora's going with the civie sector is that you should be able to have a bustling civilian economy that's colonizing lots of little rocks, but that's just a background to the military sector which deals with far fewer installations.  Hmmm - that made me realize that you might want to distinguish civie populations (e.g those with CMC) from "military" populations like Earth - the civie populations would have a much less detailed internal structure than military ones.  This would give you the best of both worlds - lots of little civie populations that are essentially terrain for the military game.

On looping over lots of habitable planets - yep, this is one of the things I was afraid would break if I just expanded my race's gravitational range to include zero.  Actually, this was my primary worry (I could have just set the lower bound to e.g. .0001 to avoid divide-by-zeros) - I'm surprised I didn't mention it.

On the medical effects of low G: I view this as a question of whether you want to support it in the game.  If you want to support it, then you could make up technobabble about some magic drug which offsets the effects of low G.

[SNIP] - you've already worked through the CMC stuff, so I'm skipping that discussion.

Would it be fair to say that your real goal is easier exploitation of a system's mineral resources and that the low-gravity colony is really a means to that end rather than an end in itself? If we could find some way of accessing the minerals in all those small bodies, probably by the CMXs, the low-gravity colony is no longer required?

I don't think so (in other words I was bringing easier explotation up as a beneficial side effect, rather than a goal).  My vision is to have an alien race jumping into the Sol system see something that looks like DW's description of the first jump into a Home Hive - civilian installations everywhere, with lots of traffic between them.  As mentioned above, I also think it's much more exciting to have people spread throughout the system, as opposed to being trapped on a few medium-gravity rocks.  So this whole discussion started from "Wow!! It would be really cool to be able to have low gravity colonies.  Gee!  I can do it myself.  Uh-oh, I'll kill the game engine if I do that."

John

[Paul M]

On the issue of troops and gravity.  This issue goes each direction so long as you are not using energy weapons.  Since bullets are ballistic at any range beyond point blank troops used to firing a bullet in 1 G will miss baddly when firing in 0.5G or 1.5G since in both cases the drop of the bullet (something compensated for my by training) would be wrong.  Since it is largely impossible to miss with an energy weapon on "battlefield ranges" except due to insufficient time to aim or visibility issues it doesn't matter if you assume your people are going around with FGMP14 or the like.  Guassrifles and the like are also signficantly less affected since their trajectory is likely flat out to most nominal ranges so its more a point and shoot rather than lead and so on.  More or less the same as modern HVAP rounds from tanks can be fired without Balistic Computer assist out to nearly 1000 m (or so Avalon Hill claimed in Arab Israli Wars).  Its also important to realize that a lot of things are not easy to untrain and how you respond to your local gravity well is one of them.  Also I am dubious there would be large scale adaption to different gravity wells by most races without genetic engineering.  A human born and living their entire life in zero G would likely never adapt back to 1 G living without major medical intervention but their children would.

But a change in birthrate makes the most sense for a different gravity then your nominal range.  I would not mind seeing orbital habitates or hollowed asteroids spun up to provide artificial gravity.  I'm just not sure what they should cost to set up.  They could then have everything except for mines and terraformers that a regular colony could have.

On the civillian companies for mining.

1.  I can't imagine the government ownes the mines in the game, those must represent companies and the player is giving them incentives to expand.  This is neither here not there though.  I think it would be better to start by looking into what can the civillian mining groups do that the player isn't likely to do rather than setting up what amounts to competion.  I would think the two areas that might make sense are asteroid mining and gas giant fuel processing.  These are two areas that the player is less likely to be involved in anyway and they can be a major help.  Also they are a near sure fire return on investment at least for the fuel processing.

2.  For the civillian mining complexes I think that you should have a few requirments for them.  There must be a insystem colony of a certain size to support the mine.  There must be in system civillian shipping available to set it up.  Government approval must be granted to exploit the minerals in question (probably best to initially start with it all set to off and then allow it to be toggled on).  This sort of thing prevents wild cat exploiters and ensures a reasonable chance of profitability.

It is possible I am being too paranoid about the affects the civillian mining might have but I think easing into this is safer.

On duranium.  Steve, can you look into your building requirements and perhaps diversify more?  I know you are looking at mines but at the moment the sole driver for your economy is duranium.  And for your heavy industry duranium and neutroniun in terms of shipyards and such.  Perhaps change HQ units to require different mineral inputs since these are mostly REMFs anyway.  Speaking of which could you add a button to re-name the type of infantry unit?  So I can set my default Assault Infantry to Marines  etc?  Automatic mines could then have a much higher demand for secondary resources (higher Uridium to represent the teleop links) rather than simply double the duranium demand.  It is just very odd that for the most part the only thing you need to grow your economy is duranium (and neutronium) and all other minearls just accumulate and are only useful in ship construction/maintenance.  The only other critical material appears to be solarium but then that is TN's equivelent of black gold.

I'd suggest going at this slow though possibly changing this will have unintentional consiquences but a more diverse economy seems like a net benifit to the game.  I know right now I rate a planet largely by its duranium availablity and amount rather than what else it has.  I can't recall shipping anything but duranium by cargo vessels though I had lots of other stuff flying about in packets.  I found it better to ship duranium to the home system and build the facility there and ship it back rather than shipping duranium to the colony to have them build things.  I only shipped other minerals to aid in assembly of PDCs if the planet in question lacked them or to set up terraformers and a research lab one time but routine shipping was otherwise restricted to duranium.