Suggestions for v5.1

[Steve Walmsley (OP)]

That's because I lied to you - it's not there.  It used to be on the 'Display' tab, or rather there used to be a check box to not show neutral contacts, or to not show a specific race's contacts, or maybe I'm confusing it with the (F11) 'Galactic Map' or even with SA.

So you're right, that's an excellent suggestion.  Steve, please put a checkbox on one of the (F3) 'System Map' sidebar tabs to show/hide civilian contacts.

I have already added a contact filter dropdown for v5.0. You can choose from:

All Contacts
No Civilians
No Civilians/Allied
Neutral or Hostile
Hostile Only

Steve

[Steve Walmsley (OP)]

I'm not sure if this has been suggested before (I did a search, but I wasn't really sure what to search for).

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the current system has a minimum population growth of 2% once you reach 1 billion. Above that amount and it never falls further, no matter how high the population gets - even if you have 500 billion (I know, that would take a ridiculously long time to reach, but still).

How about an overall maximum population on worlds based on their size? Then you could have the population growth decline further past the 1 billion mark based on that size, eventually reaching 0 where the population growth would level out with as many births as there are deaths.

The reason I suggest this is, as it stands, the only need to ever colonize other worlds is to boost your population growth a bit - but once you reach a certain population level the minor boosts in growth you get from having colonies doesn't make that much difference since you're always getting the 2% on your homeworld. It's still useful to have worlds for minerals and bases to maintain your ships, but the entire financial, research, and construction capacity of your empire can be housed on Earth - even if you have billions upon billions of people. By limiting worlds to, say, 400,000 x diameter (or some similar number, whatever is deemed appropriate for gameplay - 400,000 would give earth a 5.1 billion limit) it would make colonizing worlds more important in the long run, since to support your 500 billion people you would need a large empire of worlds instead of just a ridiculously productive Earth. And even before you reached the limit, you would want to move the people off Earth since the growth would be constantly declining as the population got higher.

It could just be divided out and have the growth rate decline linearly until the limit is reached. So for example a 5 billion limit at 1 billion growth would be 2%. Add a billion and you're now about 20% closer to the limit, so growth declines 20% to 1.6%. At 4 billion you would only get 0.4% growth, eventually declining to 0 as you approach the limit. Over the limit would make growth negative, so you couldn't just farm colonists on other worlds and send them to Earth.

Thoughts?

The Population growth is already lower than 2% for large populations but I forgot to update the growth value displayed on the pop summary window (well, I forgot to remove the line of code that says "if pop growth < 2 then pop growth = 2"). The pop growth in the 5-day increment is correct though so large pops have been growing more slowly for several versions now.

The growth calculation is as follows for ideal habitable worlds

            //colony annual growth rate, which is dependent on total population. Formula is 20 divided by cube root of pop
            Growth Rate = 20 / (CurrentPop ^ (1 / 3))
           
            If Growth Rate > 10 Then Growth Rate= 10
           
            Growth Rate = Growth Rate x CommanderGrowthBonus
           
            // divide by hundred to create a percentage
            Growth Rate = Growth Rate/ 100
           
            If NPR = True then Growth Rate = Growth Rate x (DifficultyModifier / 100)
       
Steve

[Paul]

Ah, ok. Due to the display I always thought it was a minimum of 2%, I never actually checked how much it was growing to see if it was different from displayed. Good to know.

Well then, my new suggestion is to incorporate the size of the planet and perhaps availability of water into the growth equation.

Maybe take the diameter divided by 10,000 (or some other number, you could use the diameter of earth if you wanted earth to be 1) and then divide the CurrentPop by that before using it, so that larger worlds could support the larger pop before getting into the lower growth rates, and thus be more desireable for colonization.

Something like this:
Growth Rate = 20 / ((CurrentPop / (Diameter / 10000)) ^ (1 / 3))

That way a 1 billion pop world Earth's size would grow at a rate of about 2.17, while 1 billion pop on Mars would grow at a rate of about 1.76. Or if you used the diameter of earth as the diameter divisor you would have 2% on earth and 1.62% on mars.

Presence of water could be just a simple modifier added in the same way as the governor bonus, like a straight 10% bonus for having water. Or you could do it based on the extent, like extent / 5. So mars would be a 2% boost for the 10% water while Earth would be a 14% boost since its 70%. If water already does something cool that I don't know about it may not be necessary, but I always thought having water should be a "Great! That planet's my next colony" sort of thing, since water is so necessary for life.

I hope you don't mind suggestions like these. When I make a suggestion on something I try to come up with some sort of formula or example if its relevant, and here since you've given me the formula for how it currently works I'm fiddling with that. I've known some people that don't like others meddling with their math, so if this is unwelcome just let me know.

[Aldaris]

As an addition to the new display options, I always like seeing the buzzing activity of the civvies in my systems, but not the endless wall of text. Would it be possible to add in an option to not display each civvie ship but display groups of them as 'civillian fleet' instead?

[Commodore_Areyar]

Add a similar box to the espionage target selector in the Teams tab (F2) for diplomacy teams.
(Or make the box work for all teams that require a target empire.)

Similarly add an espionage option to the alien diplomacy interface.
Probably most logical to add to one of the intelligence pages, primary diplomacy screen would be most clear though

This will be most useful  for starting players, but duplication of function is always good for ease of play.

---

On a related track, will it be possible in time to direct espionage teams to preferably perform a certain type of mission?
(As in MOO i think it was.)

Areyar

[Father Tim]

As an addition to the new display options, I always like seeing the buzzing activity of the civvies in my systems, but not the endless wall of text. Would it be possible to add in an option to not display each civvie ship but display groups of them as 'civillian fleet' instead?

Or better yet, a way of separating the civilians 'display options (ship names, speed, sensors readings, transponders, movement trails, etc.) from all the other ships' display options.  Actually, now that I think about it, I'd like separate display options for each of the categories you gave on the 'contact filter' dropdown above (plus mass driver packets).  So I can choose a combination of just dots, dots with tails, dots with tails & labels, full info, etc.

[Father Tim]

Would it be possible to get 'Wealth points' added to the list of 'SM Mods' on that pop-up on the (F2) 'Population & Production' screen?  I realize that wealth is not currently associated with individual colonies, except in the case of conquering an enemy's Capital, so that might break something in the database.  Though I suppose at current any colony in the Empire can theoretically access 100% of the empire's wealth, so maybe it's a not a problem.  Plus, it allows for SM Mode emergency infusions of cash, if you want that sort of thing.  As it stands now, I don't believe there's any way to "give" an Empire money, short of upping it's racial wealth tech a few levels.

[Steve Walmsley (OP)]

Would it be possible to get 'Wealth points' added to the list of 'SM Mods' on that pop-up on the (F2) 'Population & Production' screen?  I realize that wealth is not currently associated with individual colonies, except in the case of conquering an enemy's Capital, so that might break something in the database.  Though I suppose at current any colony in the Empire can theoretically access 100% of the empire's wealth, so maybe it's a not a problem.  Plus, it allows for SM Mode emergency infusions of cash, if you want that sort of thing.  As it stands now, I don't believe there's any way to "give" an Empire money, short of upping it's racial wealth tech a few levels.

Added for v5.0

Steve

[Beersatron]

An idea on Star Swarm tactics after reading Steve's latest chapter.

Possible spoiler so I will wrap it in the spoiler tags.

[spoiler:3s7wm8z0]You have it so that a Precursor will ram if it runs out of ammo. Can you apply similar logic to the Star Swarm but instead of damaging the target, they latch on and perform what could be described as a boarding attempt? Your description of the Star Swarm mentioned that no air was detected streaming from them when hit, but fluid was - so organic ships.

So you could say that instead of having a 'crew' of sentient beings their crew could be macro-scale white-blood/defense/repair cells and that these cells can survive in another ships confines for a short period of time once injected. They would finally degrade after time due to being out of their normal transport fluid.

I am not suggesting that they should be able to take control of the ship, but they could do damage to components and kill crew or embarked marines.

They would only do this against slow moving ships and, if there is a way for them to detect such a thing, if that ship has very tough internal HTKs.

To expand it further, if they manage to kill the whole crew, you can then redesign or create a new class of workers that have a tractor/grapple so they can then tow a derelict ship (or wreck?) to the queen for consumption    


On a side note, I have watched a couple of swarms in SM mode but haven't seen them actually do much even in a system with plenty of minerals and them knowing about the WPs. The workers have orders to move to a mineral location, but I don't see them doing anything with it - is it abstracted? Could you explain some more of the Star Swarm in a spoiler/snerker thread?[/spoiler:3s7wm8z0]

[Sainthe]

As I understand it, larger warheads, and thus larger explosions, do not help to hit the target in any way. This seems a bit odd; I would expect missiles to have a chance to at least do one point of damage if they missed but still detonated.

This may be because by "missed its target" it's meant that the missile was so far off course that the detonation had no chance of ever harming the target.

I'm suggesting that warheads help the "chance to at least do one point of damage." I'm not sure if this is how it truly works, but it seems to be a bit weird to put a massive warhead on a missile, such as the AIM-54 Phoenix, if it doesn't help it to kill cruise missiles and such.

[Sainthe]

I'm trying to put together a dogfight missile with thermal sensors. I'm pleased with it, but a little disappointed with the thermal sensing capability.

Fighters and FAC don't put out a lot of signature from their engines, even though they are quite strong, and thermal reduction makes it even worse; However, your typical large ship puts out around 1000-2000 TH!

It seems kind of silly that a thermal sensing missile is better at long range against large ships then short range, when that role is already taken by Active missile sensors; I would expect the reverse to be true. Thermal just doesn't mesh that well with Fighter-Fighter combat, so I suggest adding a boost to FTR and FAC engine signatures.

I would imagine all that super-charging would have a penalty to heat signature or something. Also, and I'm not too sure about this, a large ship has a larger hull to dissipate heat with, while a small ship is stuck with its massive engine heat.

[Sainthe]

Allow navigational updates for passive and active sensor contacts to be sent to missiles with active and passive homing, via the Fire Control on board the launching ship.

This would require a change so that a Fire Control can be assigned passive sensor contacts. Basically, you can now guide the missile for as long as your Fire Control range allows, but after that it's all up to the missile guidance systems.

I don't think this needs to allow switching targets. I'm just looking for a basic system to complement the on board missile sensors; perhaps it could be a costly option added to the Fire Control design page.

[backstab]

Special Forces or Commando Companies/Battalions

Can be used as normal ground forces or used for sabotage (industry/terraformers/maintenance facilities)

[Sherban]

So any news on v5.0? Here in Canada we have a long week-end and I'm looking forward to a loooooong play session!

[solops]

Why not put the Race environmental ranges and environmental notes, both of which are found on the system screen, in the large, unused area of the Evnironment screen (the one where you control terraformers)?