Quote from: nuclearslurpee on February 15, 2021, 01:16:38 PM

This will eventually happen for all bodies with a colony cost greater than 1.5, although for most bodies you ever want to have a large colony on the population at which this happens will be large enough that you'd terraform the planet anyways (for example at CC 2.0 the break point is 215.4 million pop). Funny thing is that you can keep adding population and eventually for CC < 5.0 reach a point where you increase manufacturing population again; this point is for any suitable body just short of 242 million pop.

Of course if you have a very high CC you'll reach the break point quickly but the orbital habitats should ensure that you retain manufacturing capability.

Uhhhh, I don't think that's how it works? Every point of CC adds 5% to the environment workers. At 4 CC, the percentage will be 30%, above which no workers will ever work for manufacturing once the said breaking point is reached.

Sorry, just realised you said LESS than 5 and not MORE than, nevermind.

And to make sure it's clear, it's less than CC 5.0, which means even CC 4.99 will still (very, very slowly) gain manufacturing workers above 242m pop. The fraction of agricultural workers is (1 + CC) * 5%, so at CC 5.0 you have 30% agriculture, not CC 4.0 where you "only" have 25%.

Quote from: db48x on February 21, 2021, 06:42:33 PM

That's what I thought too, but I haven't had an opportunity to do it in a real game. I just tried it out though, and found that this is not how it works.

I've tweaked the environmental tolerances of the humans in my current game, so Venus has a colony cost of 50. I SM'd in an orbital habitat and a million people to live in it. 0.82m went into the manufacturing sector, 0.18m into services, and none into agriculture as expected. So far so good, although I would prefer if a fixed 5% of people went into agriculture, even if what they're really doing is making spare parts for the hydroponics gardens.

Then I added 5000 infrastructure and another 1m people. All one million of the new people went into agriculture as expected for a colony cost of 50, but now there are only 0.58m people in manufacturing, because so many people have shifted over to services.

Adding another million people living in infrastructure brings the manufacturing sector down to just 0.3 million.

So it seems that you do have to keep up with population growth by continually adding more orbital habitats in order to maintain your manufacturing sector population. If the planet has a large natural capacity, that will add up to a lot of habitats that you'll have to build and move into place.

I don't recall if any of Steve's games have involved using orbital habitats to staff labs on a body with an ancient construct or not, but maybe we should ask him to SM one in on Venus in his current game and try it out. It would be interesting to see how often he needs to send a new habitat to maintain the manufacturing sector, once he can set it as a stable population.

Ah. So it's not that OrbHab population are being dragged into agricultural jobs, it's the population-based increase in services requirement - which goes up very quick because of the CC. That makes sense, though it obviously limits OrbHabs as they're not very viable for e.g. Venus in that case.

This is why the weighting that this game does is actually important for making habitats useful long term on high CC worlds. Essentially if a world results in 100% agriculture worker requirement and has a capacity of 2bn, if you have 2bn worth of orbital habitat and a total population of 4bn, the agriculture requirement is pushed down to 50% of the total population. I'd imagine that if you had 4bn habitat population and 2bn surface population this can be pushed down to 25% agriculture. Mind you, this is an extreme example but the point is that weighting the agriculture requirement based on the orbital/surface capacity ratio helps make sure that spilling into the surface can actually work out.

Of course the cost of building that much habitation capacity is another matter entirely.

Quote from: QuakeIV on February 11, 2021, 10:33:12 PM

Quote from: Kylemmie on February 11, 2021, 11:28:55 AM

I've steered away from using Hab's on worlds I  don't plan on Terraforming if at all possible, due to the pop auto building infra and moving to the surface and causing worker shortages because my Hab peeps now have to work extra hard to support the idiots on the planet.

As Jorgen mentioned and you implied by your quest to find a better way - Unless it's for Role Play it's a pretty straight forward formula.  Is the bonus worth the cost. Since it's not given, I'll assume 100% bonus for now. Your choices seem to be try to just get the 10M (iirc) in orbit for the empire wide bonus, or staff 30 labs to get a bonus 30 labs of RP. Seems a lot of effort unless your current pop is a bottleneck for 30 labs worth of RP.

I think the 'idiots on the planet' (whom I also hate) pay their own bills, labor wise.  It seems to be tracked separately from when I was dealing with that (though I could be wrong).

This was my understanding. OrbHab population is supposed to be exclusively manufacturing, and the pop growth + infra that propagates down to the planet surface is purely extra on top of that which is subject to the usual rules - in which case it's free infra, so...

That's what I thought too, but I haven't had an opportunity to do it in a real game. I just tried it out though, and found that this is not how it works.

I've tweaked the environmental tolerances of the humans in my current game, so Venus has a colony cost of 50. I SM'd in an orbital habitat and a million people to live in it. 0.82m went into the manufacturing sector, 0.18m into services, and none into agriculture as expected. So far so good, although I would prefer if a fixed 5% of people went into agriculture, even if what they're really doing is making spare parts for the hydroponics gardens.

Then I added 5000 infrastructure and another 1m people. All one million of the new people went into agriculture as expected for a colony cost of 50, but now there are only 0.58m people in manufacturing, because so many people have shifted over to services.

Adding another million people living in infrastructure brings the manufacturing sector down to just 0.3 million.

So it seems that you do have to keep up with population growth by continually adding more orbital habitats in order to maintain your manufacturing sector population. If the planet has a large natural capacity, that will add up to a lot of habitats that you'll have to build and move into place.

I don't recall if any of Steve's games have involved using orbital habitats to staff labs on a body with an ancient construct or not, but maybe we should ask him to SM one in on Venus in his current game and try it out. It would be interesting to see how often he needs to send a new habitat to maintain the manufacturing sector, once he can set it as a stable population.

I already have jump drive handling 620 tons lol. But... Why would I need a spaceport? If my freifghters have cargo shuttles I can unload the minerals just fine if I remember correctly? And if I have minerals and construction capacity thanks to the "Automated Construction Factories" what else do I need to build an orbital habitat space station?

In addition to minerals and construction capacity, you do need a spaceport to be able to do that. From the wiki/change log:

Space Stations can be built by construction factories at any population that includes a Spaceport.

http://aurorawiki.pentarch.org/index.php?title=C-Space_Stations

So unless you have a spaceport and the population to support it, you won't get the option to build a ship designed as a space station.

Quote

Bonus points for using ground force construction capacity.

Holy smeg you're a genius! How could I not think about it before and have no one suggest it before? Why bother with tugging so damn many habitats if I can make them directly at destination?
I only need to things to make it happen: minerals and construction capacity.
Minerals I can transport.
Construction capacity I can get from "Automated Construction Factories" aka ground construction units indeed.
No population required.
Fast to build.
No tugging micromanagement and endless waiting for it to complete.
This is brilliant.

I tried doing this a while back, but it didn't turn out the way I expected. You need a spaceport to build orbital habitats with construction facilities. Spaceports require population. It is in theory possible to do this and avoid stabilizing JP's or building enormous jump drives, but you do need some initial population to man the spaceport to get started.

Perhaps it is possible with commercial jump drives and two of the smallest orbital habitats.

There is also another solution, but I never got so far as to try it. Find a worthless body in the same system that is easy to colonize. Get 1.000.000 population there and get a spaceport up and running. Build your first habitats, tug them to the target, move all facilities there, and shut down operations on the inital colony. It is a bit more micromanagement, but perhaps more doable than researching and building a jump drive that can handle 500.000 tons.

Quote from: QuakeIV on February 11, 2021, 10:33:12 PM

Quote from: Kylemmie on February 11, 2021, 11:28:55 AM

I've steered away from using Hab's on worlds I  don't plan on Terraforming if at all possible, due to the pop auto building infra and moving to the surface and causing worker shortages because my Hab peeps now have to work extra hard to support the idiots on the planet.

As Jorgen mentioned and you implied by your quest to find a better way - Unless it's for Role Play it's a pretty straight forward formula.  Is the bonus worth the cost. Since it's not given, I'll assume 100% bonus for now. Your choices seem to be try to just get the 10M (iirc) in orbit for the empire wide bonus, or staff 30 labs to get a bonus 30 labs of RP. Seems a lot of effort unless your current pop is a bottleneck for 30 labs worth of RP.

I think the 'idiots on the planet' (whom I also hate) pay their own bills, labor wise.  It seems to be tracked separately from when I was dealing with that (though I could be wrong).

This was my understanding. OrbHab population is supposed to be exclusively manufacturing, and the pop growth + infra that propagates down to the planet surface is purely extra on top of that which is subject to the usual rules - in which case it's free infra, so...

I thought I experienced something bad and read some posts that verified it, but I may have been mistaken.  At some CC costs, adding pop past a certain point actually reduces available workforce. What I thought I saw happening was that the pop on planet couldn't support themselves and reduced the workers on the Hab (the overall colony total available) to make it up. But I may have misinterpreted the data.

I've played this game for months on end and swear I don't know half of it.

Mine is the opposite. I have never had time to try it out yet I know 80% of the theory and 50% of the practice.

Thats good to hear. Always thought that anomalies that give bonuses to specific research should be added to incentivize spreading out labs. Glad to see Steve was one step ahead!

I've played this game for months on end and swear I don't know half of it.