Aurora 4x
C# Aurora => C# Mechanics => Topic started by: Steve Walmsley on May 13, 2024, 12:37:15 PM
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In my current campaign, I am 32 years into a conventional start and I have four shipping lines for the player race. The largest has forty-eight huge colony ships and forty-nine huge freighters, plus numerous smaller ones, and seems to be building a new huge ship every few weeks. The other three shipping lines are considerably smaller.
The number of huge colony ships means that the civs will build up a new colony very quickly and also eat into source populations fairly quickly too.
So I am considering changing how shipping lines work, so they don't become so overwhelming, while trying to retain the flavour. I have a few ideas, such as halving the money received by civilian shipping, changing civilian designs so they are slower, significantly reducing the money for in-system transport, or maybe paying by distance travelled in km rather than transits made or limiting how often new ships can be built.
Another option is replacing dividends with a percentage maintenance payment, which is modified by an admin overhead that increases as the number of ships increases - effectively limiting the rate at which a shipping line can increase in size.
A more dramatic change would be altering transport for all ships, not just civilians, so less can be transported. That means fewer cargo points and less colonist capacity per ton.
However, I would like to hear other opinions and ideas before deciding how to tackle it.
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I really like how the civilian system currently works, I'm in 100+ years conventional start and I do not have any performance issues due to civilian + love the flavour they add.
That being said, you could add a corruption and waste money variable which increases proportionally with the shipping line size, so that they have less money.
The bigger the ship, the bigger the waste and corruption.
Also the bigger the shipping line, the bigger the corruption.
This simulate the increase number of offices, employees etc.
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Interesting. Changing base carrying capacity of ships seems reckless. I can see it causing problems for the early game, which is already slow. Besides, all it really does is postpone what is already happening. Eventually, the civvies will just build more ships or larger ships and it all comes back again.
The maintenance idea seems good. A nice soft cap on individual potential. If I understood it correctly, it would only affect each line separately and so not cause problems with a growing empire, as new lines can simply pop up over time and fulfill that demand until they too become "decadent" and slow down growth to potentially nothing.
I think it is logical and appropriate that larger empires do things more massively and faster than smaller ones. Especially if compact in territory. It gives a sense of progress and allows the player to more easily marshall additional resources toward other interesting parts of the game. It provides a more or less clear transition between the early-game exploration phase where everything is slow; through the mid-game expansion phase where everything is fast; to the late-game exploitation phase where you can do anything you wish due to having infinite resources.
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Instead of reducing the growth rate of shipping lines, I'd impose a cap on their size and number. Be it a soft or hard cap. I've made the experience in long games that civilian shipping can grow to massive proportions and obsolete the player economy with the wealth generated via taxes.
Suggestion: Lines pay a minimal amount of dividends/maintenance until they make up 10% of yearly income, and then the maintenance increases exponentially. Say they give up half their income in maintenance and only pay half their taxes if shipping line income makes up 30% of your yearly income, halving again if it reaches 50% etc.
In this scheme all lines would have the same maintenance rate. I don't really see much point in multiple lines (besides flavor), and have also observed that there ends up being a few massive lines and a lot of tiny ones. So I'd just impose a hard cap on the number of lines per race.
That doesn't solve the issue that planet-moon shipping lines are obscenely profitable. Tying the income to distance traveled sounds good. Perhaps with a small fixed component, say 10% of current income, so that these kinds of lines also don't become worthless. Maybe tie it to travel time instead, including loading and unloading?
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--- Perhaps give them a sort of fluff base? Like CMCs, they'll spring up on eligible worlds, but would serve as mock "supply bases". Having these tied to player colony sizes, pops, etc and making shipping lines rely on these outside of truly huge ships could give a lot of levers for both you the dev to balance with and you the player to interact with.
--- Sorry for no effort post on this, I usually turn them off myself. XD
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paying by distance travelled in km rather than transits made
This change makes every kind of sense.
Unless the computational cost of the distance calculations is excessive, it seems like a worthwhile idea.
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Being honest, I like the way the civilian lines work now and like the experience you are describing Steve because it makes the growth of the empire feel organic to me.
That said, could we add some kind of mechanic where if a civilian ship sits idle for too long the line decommissions the ship? In game it can be explained as a company doesn't want to pay for maintenance of a ship that isn't doing anything. So if you want to decrease the number of ships you just mark a bunch of colonies as stable and wait for the ships to disappear.
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paying by distance travelled in km rather than transits made
This change makes every kind of sense.
Unless the computational cost of the distance calculations is excessive, it seems like a worthwhile idea.
Ships already keep track of the total distance they've traveled, so it shouldn't be too expensive to keep track of the distance on a per-contract basis as well.
If we do end up going with some sort of cap or extra cost for the shipping lines it seems like it would be a good idea to make it toggleable or adjustable as a modifier in the game settings, since it seems people have pretty different preferences regarding their civilian economies.
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Something ahistorical but should allow the player to have some control over what type of game they want to play.
Have a modifier in the initial game settings which will limit ratio of number and displacement of civilian shipping based upon the player fleet. Maybe a "max number of civvie shipping lines" as well.
Having a ratio will make an inverse relationship on number of ships and size. The higher the number of the ships, the less size they will be and vice versa, regardless of the values chosen. It would be nice to be able to do this on a "per line" basis as an option to replicate large interstellar haulers and intra-system tramp freighters to both exist, though if that isn't doable, having the player choose between taking care of one or the other and the civilians covering the remainder will work.
For an easy example, let's take a "small" force of 100 ships totaling 1,000,000 tons, so if the player chooses 100% number and 100% displacement, the civilian shipping line(s) will default to having 100 ships massing 10,000 each, so a "jack of all, master of none" effect. A 10%/100% choice would result in 10 ships at 100,000 each, so interstellar transport vibe, whilst a 100%/10% would be a small packet courier fleet of 1,000 ton ships. This of course is based on averages, and allowing over 100% on either gives more options, but not necessary.
Just seems easier to mechanically tie it into what the player is doing than other mechanical subsytstems. It will naturally provide a civilian shipping economy which reflects the player's own demands and "actions" in the ship economy and how that would trigger a civilian response.
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Consider that civilians just use 50% power reduced engines and keep the higher speeds of those ships. This means less ships built overall as they are more expensive but you will still deliver goods fairly equally in quantity perhaps slightly less. They don't pay for fuel anyway so in some sense the lower powered engines can just result in performance issues later on.
So... restricting civilian companies to 50% power engines would automatically result in less ships built.
In addition to this each company should pay a higher administrative fee the more ships they have. I also think that shorter trips should pay way less dividend for companies in general.
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In my current campaign, I am 32 years into a conventional start and I have four shipping lines for the player race. The largest has forty-eight huge colony ships and forty-nine huge freighters, plus numerous smaller ones, and seems to be building a new huge ship every few weeks. The other three shipping lines are considerably smaller.
The number of huge colony ships means that the civs will build up a new colony very quickly and also eat into source populations fairly quickly too.
So I am considering changing how shipping lines work, so they don't become so overwhelming, while trying to retain the flavour. I have a few ideas, such as halving the money received by civilian shipping, changing civilian designs so they are slower, significantly reducing the money for in-system transport, or maybe paying by distance travelled in km rather than transits made or limiting how often new ships can be built.
Another option is replacing dividends with a percentage maintenance payment, which is modified by an admin overhead that increases as the number of ships increases - effectively limiting the rate at which a shipping line can increase in size.
A more dramatic change would be altering transport for all ships, not just civilians, so less can be transported. That means fewer cargo points and less colonist capacity per ton.
However, I would like to hear other opinions and ideas before deciding how to tackle it.
The problem with all of the above is the snowball effect. At some point, system breaks.
Instead of reducing the growth rate of shipping lines, I'd impose a cap on their size and number. Be it a soft or hard cap. I've made the experience in long games that civilian shipping can grow to massive proportions and obsolete the player economy with the wealth generated via taxes.
Suggestion: Lines pay a minimal amount of dividends/maintenance until they make up 10% of yearly income, and then the maintenance increases exponentially. Say they give up half their income in maintenance and only pay half their taxes if shipping line income makes up 30% of your yearly income, halving again if it reaches 50% etc.
In this scheme all lines would have the same maintenance rate. I don't really see much point in multiple lines (besides flavor), and have also observed that there ends up being a few massive lines and a lot of tiny ones. So I'd just impose a hard cap on the number of lines per race.
That doesn't solve the issue that planet-moon shipping lines are obscenely profitable. Tying the income to distance traveled sounds good. Perhaps with a small fixed component, say 10% of current income, so that these kinds of lines also don't become worthless. Maybe tie it to travel time instead, including loading and unloading?
I'm in agreement with Zap0 on this matter, and have been for a long time. Both he and I engage in lengthy campaigns with multiple factions, and civilian fleets tend to grow excessively, leading to culling as the only solution. However, dealing with 20 or 30 new ships popping up each year adds unwanted micromanagement.
As Zap0 mentioned, I believe there must be a way to limit civilian fleets to a set number of ships, which could even be customizable. I admire the system used to manage population and immigration in Songs of Syx; perhaps you could take a quick look at it.
Regarding the number of shipping lines, once again, I side with Zap0. However, instead of being customizable, I agree that there should be a hard cap. In my opinion, anything between 3 and 5 should suffice.
If the above measures are implemented, wealth becomes irrelevant except for balancing purposes. It will then be necessary to conduct test games to determine the sweet spot for a dividend cap, tax, or any other required balance adjustments.
In conclusion, I believe the proposed solution won't affect players who are content with the current state of civilian management, as they can leave it at 0 (the standard setting for Aurora) and continue enjoying the game as it is. Meanwhile, players engaged in larger campaigns or less interested in civilian aspects can decide how effective they want their civilian navy to be.
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I definitely feel that some kind of rebalancing needs to take place - in year 88 of my game, the civilian sector makes up a staggering 81.8% of my economy. (38.8% Shipping Colonists, 25.1% Shipping Trade Goods, 12.1% Passenger Liners, 5.8% Exports.)
It's basically nullified the entire wealth-as-a-resource aspect of the game, since I've got an income 7x as great as my expenditures.
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The number of huge colony ships means that the civs will build up a new colony very quickly and also eat into source populations fairly quickly too.
At the very least can we get the oft requested reserve/target min/max settings for population, similar to whats already in place for minerals and installations, so that our source colonies aren't perpetually evacuated if left unattended.
A more dramatic change would be altering transport for all ships, not just civilians, so less can be transported. That means fewer cargo points and less colonist capacity per ton.
This would only delay the problem but as the game continues and the shipping lines continue to grow they will inevitably reach a point were they are too good at their jobs again.
I do like the idea of a cap on the number of lines and their ships, but I disagree slightly than what others have suggested on what the cap should be based on. Id like to see it based on # of colonies and their population. Every colony with a minimum of 10mil population can generate a single shipping line company per 1Bil population. So if a line had 50mil it would have have 1 shipping line, 999mil would also have 1 line, but 1,000,000,001 population would get a second and so on. Each Line would get a fixed size and number of ships based on overlapping population increments as well. Some example numbers could be as such: 1 small ship per 10mil pop, 1 medium per 50mil pop, 1 large per 100mil pop, and 1 huge per 200mil pop. Each line would therefor have a maximum cap of 5 huge, 10 large, 20 medium, and 100 small ships, so if an example colony has 567mil pop, it would have 2 huge, 5 large, 11 medium, and 56 small ships. Again, just example numbers and would need to be adjusted based on play testing in determining what # of ships are needed to make the game function, but the neat part is that it continues to grow in direct proportion to your empire so it "shouldn't" lead to an underwhelming civilian sector in the early game nor overbearing civilian sector needing DB culling. There could also be an additional factor taken into account how much the player actually uses its civilian sector. If there's an X number of contracts ordered by the player than the individual lines of the source and destination colonies may increase their number of ships, conversely if the player has few to no contracts than the lines reduce in size.
Decommissioning and replacements could be based on tech levels or probably easier to do strictly age. If I ship reaches X number of years it WILL complete its current shipment, then scrap itself, prompting the line to begin construction of a new one. As well if a population shrinks then so does its shipping line, scrapping the oldest ship at each population increment (which would also help negate source colony exodus).
As a fun additional change, if we were to have a game setting to remove mass drivers, CMC's could also produce shipping lines restricted to small ships in order to export their minerals. It's a fairly common house rule people use, and it would tie in greatly with raiders giving them even more targets of opportunity.
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I would like to see some deviation from the 1:1 freighter:colonist transport. I like civilians moving around doing stuff but what normally happens is I start marking colonies as "stable" to keep the growing fleets from draining the population sources and then the colonist fleet sits largely idle somewhere while the freighters keep moving trade goods, but the shipping company keeps manufacturing colonist ships (just in case?). That just makes the problem worse later when I open up a destination and suddenly millions and millions of colonist capacity gets directed to a single location.
I would personally be content with just a different set ratio, such as 2:1 or 3:1, but there are probably better solutions that would make everybody happy. Maybe the company occasionally checks for idle vessels and scraps one, and then at the same time launches a vessel of the other type. Or when it's time to construct a new vessel the company checks how much money it made in the last year on colonist vs freight transport and builds whichever type made more money (with some chance to build the other type anyway, lest the system run away fully to one type or another).
Also I think colonist transport shouldn't generate tax money for the player. It doesn't make sense that I accidentally tell 50 million people to move to Mars, getting paid the whole time, and then when I realize my mistake and have them move back to Ganymede to work in the mines I get paid again.
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I would like to see some deviation from the 1:1 freighter:colonist transport. I like civilians moving around doing stuff but what normally happens is I start marking colonies as "stable" to keep the growing fleets from draining the population sources and then the colonist fleet sits largely idle somewhere while the freighters keep moving trade goods, but the shipping company keeps manufacturing colonist ships (just in case?). That just makes the problem worse later when I open up a destination and suddenly millions and millions of colonist capacity gets directed to a single location.
I would personally be content with just a different set ratio, such as 2:1 or 3:1, but there are probably better solutions that would make everybody happy. Maybe the company occasionally checks for idle vessels and scraps one, and then at the same time launches a vessel of the other type. Or when it's time to construct a new vessel the company checks how much money it made in the last year on colonist vs freight transport and builds whichever type made more money (with some chance to build the other type anyway, lest the system run away fully to one type or another).
Also I think colonist transport shouldn't generate tax money for the player. It doesn't make sense that I accidentally tell 50 million people to move to Mars, getting paid the whole time, and then when I realize my mistake and have them move back to Ganymede to work in the mines I get paid again.
To expand on some of your ideas:
Rather than simple source/destination/stable options and the heavy-handed colonist movement that occurs as a result of the massive colony fleets, allowing numeric configuration of a target would be useful, i.e. "source until x mil" and "destination until y mil" options.
Leveraging your idle vessel idea (I agree that nearly lockstep 1:1 should be deviated from):
- Idle vessels could also inform the company's decision of which hull to build as well as scrap so that they never over-build in the first place.
- In a relative sense, if colony ships have a lower percent utilization than freighters, the company could be more likely to build a freighter than a colony ship and more likely to scrap a colony ship than a freighter to balance the two utilizations. No sense building or maintaining ships in a market that's already saturated; better to expand where there's availability.
- In an absolute sense, a low percent utilization could lead to less construction and more scraping while a high percent utilization could lead to more construction and less scraping in an effort to more effectively use the existing tonnage. No need for the company to waste wealth building or maintaining vessels that aren't used.
On an entirely different note, while civilian gas harvesting can be disabled, there are no options to specifically disable civilian mining, civilian cargo, and civilian colony transport. Allowing a finer-grained disabling structure might eliminate some of the issues by removing the cause entirely.
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I can't say I know the civilian mechanics in great detail. And I don't tend to play the long games that are necessary to reach these sorts of issues. But...
Changing the growth rate/profit alone seems like not a great fix. That just means it will take longer for civilians to get out of hand. Unless you make them grow slower than your empire, in which case they'll stay permanently irrelevant.
So civilian shipping lines need to be limited. This limit needs to be with reference to the size of your empire, else civilians will be too good for small empires and too weak for large empires. The problem, such as it is, is that civilians are an exponential snowball of something for nothing. They do stuff you want, give you money rather than cost anything, and grow based on how awesome they were for you already. I think that instead of capping the "something", you should cap the "for nothing".
I think you already have the tool you need. IIRC colonies produce a finite amount of trade goods, based on their size. With tweaking amounts + profits, this provides a natural cap on the profit that can be made by shipping trade goods.
Cap luxury transport desire the same way--a finite amount desired for a population of a given size.
Cap colonist transport the same way. Maybe some tiny fraction of a colony's population wants to move to a different world (badly enough to pay for it) in a given year. Optionally, let the empire pay to have civilian ships move colonists beyond this limit. A simple checkbox for "subsidize colonist transport" would seem to be good enough.
Finally, cap shipping line size based on the profit the line earned in the last time period. (or add maintenance costs, or retire civ ships every 20 years or whatever for a similar effect) (are dividends this mechanic already?)
This way civilians will naturally expand to a certain size relative to your empire. Freighters without any trade goods to move won't earn anything, and so won't expand the cap. Ditto colonist transports. They'll grow enough to move around whatever fraction of your population in a given year. Transport beyond that limit will expand to whatever level you're paying for. If that's a lot of colonist transport, that's fine; you're paying for it! Similarly freight capacity can be expanded beyond the natural level by paying them to move installations around, but that's not an actual problem either as long as it costs enough.
Maybe also keep civs from making new ships when they have unused idle ships, even if they have money.
Might want to separate out ship types into different lines, so that a line making lots of money on goods transport doesn't mean lots of colony ships popping up, or vice versa.
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I tend to agree with everyone else that just rescaling the profit/loss for shipping lines won't solve the problem, just push it down the road a bit. That being said, I do think some suggestions here are a bit broader than needed to accomplish the stated objective:
So I am considering changing how shipping lines work, so they don't become so overwhelming, while trying to retain the flavour.
emphasis mine.
In my view (and from reading comments here), CSLs become overwhelming when they have too many ships - this unbalances the economy (due to tax income), trivializes new colony growth, causes rapid (de)population of colonies which disincentivizes use of source/destination automation, and causes performance problems (although this was mitigated by the change to use only larger ships).
Why do CSLs build too many ships? Simply put, because they keep making money and have no other way to use that money - there are no other money sinks for CSLs. This brings us back to:
Another option is replacing dividends with a percentage maintenance payment, which is modified by an admin overhead that increases as the number of ships increases - effectively limiting the rate at which a shipping line can increase in size.
I think this is probably the best starting point - as the saying goes, the bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy, so too goes the shipping company.
I would suggest implementing a civilian maintenance fee with superlinear scaling per ship. If N is the number of ships, something like N^(3/2) or maybe even N^2 (maybe this is too much) should work. If the rate of profits depends roughly on N but the rate of maintenance depends on N^(3/2), for instance, then there will eventually be a hard limit on the number of ships a CSL can buy and operate. This also means they will grow more slowly as they come closer to this point.
I would also suggest that CSL income is affected by the wealth generation tech level of their associated race (while the maintenance fee scaling remains the same throughout the game). This would mean the limit on number of ships is initially lower but increases with tech level, which is a rough analogue for the growth of the player empire.
I think this is the simplest and best approach as it is more or less completely under the hood (except for tying to research, which is only a positive change IMO). The essential flavor and interaction with CSLs otherwise remains the same, they just become more manageable. I don't like, for example, ideas about tying CSL growth to number and sizes of populations, I feel like this creates a danger of trying to micromanage populations to manipulate CSL growth (whether to speed up or slow down), which is not a style of gameplay I think fits Aurora.
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There are a few other suggestions in this thread which I think merit consideration. They do not address the issue raised in the OP, at least IMO, but they are good ideas anyways:
Consider that civilians just use 50% power reduced engines and keep the higher speeds of those ships.
Agree as this makes the minimum engine power tech more attractive and will contribute to limiting CSL growth rates due to higher costs per ship.
--- Perhaps give them a sort of fluff base? Like CMCs, they'll spring up on eligible worlds, but would serve as mock "supply bases".
This would probably be too much work, but I would highly approve of CSLs having to build/expand their own shipyards for example. Being able to pop a 200,000-ton freighter into miraculous existence with no orbital infrastructure is a little silly.
At the very least can we get the oft requested reserve/target min/max settings for population, similar to whats already in place for minerals and installations, so that our source colonies aren't perpetually evacuated if left unattended.
It is oft-requested, but I would like to add my support here. In games with multiple player races, trying to keep track of all source/destination populations across multiple races is tedious at best and impossible at worst, for a single player race maybe it is "more immersive" not to have this automation option but for multiple player race games I think it is essential. As it is, I turn off civilian shipping in multiple player race games to avoid these problems. Implementation could be simple: have a trigger population value set for a source or destination colony, and when it is reached set that colony as stable - no or minimal changes to the civilian AI are needed.
This being said, these suggestions mean potentially significant mechanical changes and a lot more work on the coding side, so while I like them I wouldn't say they are necessary to solve the problem.
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If I may, I'd like to make a different suggestion: the mechanical problem here is the result of a thematic oversight in that the ratio of colony ships to passenger liners is badly skewed from where it should be. I had to open up my last game and check the ship list to double-check - I'd been under the impression that passenger liners weren't being auto-built by civilians at all. Turns out they are... I have two shipping liners, and some 30+ civilian colony ships.
Now having lots of freighters isn't a big deal because, thematically, you should. That's the core of your economy. The majority of an empire's wealth coming from taxing the civilian economy is how you'd expect things to work. Moreover, if your government commandeers those ships you pay for it twice - first, paying them for the shipping contract, and second by missing out on the tax revenue they would've generated from their ordinary runs. Colony ships, on the other hand, don't have this trade-off. They spend their time happily shuttling colonists to and fro just as freighters move trade goods... and once the nascent colony is all filled up, they go idle.
It makes perfect sense for the government to invest in expensive slack capacity (for emergencies such as rapidly setting up a new colony to enforce a territorial claim or rapidly evacuating one due to hostile encroachment, etc.) but it certainly doesn't make sense for civilian companies to do so. The regular market for mass colonist transport just isn't big enough, in my games, to justify 30+ ships. Why this discrepancy?
Because the way colony ships operate - constantly shuttling people to and fro just as freighters shuttle goods to and fro to keep the interplanetary/interstellar economy humming - is a job that should mostly be done by passenger ships.
There will always be poor young whippersnappers looking to make their fortune in New America, and commercial colonist transport makes sense as the steerage-class passage option for them - from the shipping company's perspective as well, because while they can't pay much per cryogenic berth, if you've got 50,000 of them stacked like sardines you're making pretty good money on every trip. With that said, cryogenics are expensive and the government tends to play merry hell with immigration/emigration permissions to suit their own purposes, so the mass colonist transit industry is a bit boom-or-bust. This puts an upper limit on how many colony ships are economically viable for the economy as a whole to produce once you average out the feasts and famines.
Passenger liners, on the other hand, are ubiquitous. Just like air travel on old Earth, long-distance trips are still expensive, esp. when made on the regular, but they're still within reach of the average consumer and many, many people need to travel on the company dime for work on a regular basis. There's a constant flow of traffic between all the teeming worlds of humanity, as teleconferencing is pretty dodgy at ranges of light-seconds, and between star systems is right out (the government charges an awful lot for use of their warp point commo repeaters!) and most of those people are moving about on two-way tickets. And frankly, none of them are keen on being rendered unconscious and stuffed in a freezer every time they want to pop over to Mars from Luna to meet with new clients. Even if they were, putting someone in cryogenic stasis is no trivial matter and there could be grave medical repercussions for entering and exiting cryo repeatedly in a short timeframe - once every six to eight months is the optimistic assumption - a year or more according to pessimistic doctors.
Naturally, the government makes a good chunk of change off taxing the passenger liner business. And just as naturally, when events prompt the government to either authorize mass immigration to a new colony, or mandate mass evacuation of same, passenger lines are quick to jump at the government contracts.
tl;dr Replace a large percentage of Colony Ships generated with Passenger Liners. As companies make more money and build more ships... they tend to build more passenger liners because, economically, there's just not room for nearly as many colonist transports as there is regular passenger service.
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Please charge per distance!
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Being honest, I like the way the civilian lines work now and like the experience you are describing Steve because it makes the growth of the empire feel organic to me.
That said, could we add some kind of mechanic where if a civilian ship sits idle for too long the line decommissions the ship? In game it can be explained as a company doesn't want to pay for maintenance of a ship that isn't doing anything. So if you want to decrease the number of ships you just mark a bunch of colonies as stable and wait for the ships to disappear.
I was about to suggest exactly this one. :o
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A very interesting discussion so far. I think the consensus is we meed some type of limitation on growth, although there are different ideas for how to achieve that. I think we need something organic though, rather than an artifical limitation such as x ships per colony.
So far, based on the points made, I am considering the following changes.
1) Payment based on distance in km, not transits
2) Fewer colony ships as a percentage of total ships, although perhaps not until 6+ ships built. I might also make the choice of new ship dependent on which ones are being used.
3) Dividends replaced by an admin overhead that increases in percentage terms based on the number of ships.
4) Payments affected by racial wealth multiplier
5) Have a simple retirement limit, such as 20 years, so that new ships are cycled in.
The above should limit lines without appearing to be too artificial, yet still allow some growth and modernization over time
I am tempted to have something like civilian shipyards, or 'build capacity', or some other 'on-map' capability, but it might turn out to be a lot of work without any major gameplay impact. As we will be travelling for the foreseeable future, which means limited programming time, that probably isn't a good time investment.
I won't be implementing anything for a few days though, so happy to listen to the debate.
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1) Payment based on distance in km, not transits
If you go through with this change, make sure that you make it so that transports will be weighted towards picking routes that make them a decent amount of income, instead of doing Earth <-> Moon runs for pennies on the dollar.
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5) Have a simple retirement limit, such as 20 years, so that new ships are cycled in.
Should probably tie this to racial research modifier, or possibly even tech level. So that lines aren't being overly "wasteful" by scrapping and replacing ships with (near) identical copies if the player hasn't made any significant tech progression. 20 Years would probably be a good baseline but if you are playing with limited administration and a 20% research rate, a ship would have a much longer useful service life and could hang around for another couple decades before reaching true obsolescence
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5) Have a simple retirement limit, such as 20 years, so that new ships are cycled in.
Should probably tie this to racial research modifier, or possibly even tech level. So that lines aren't being overly "wasteful" by scrapping and replacing ships with (near) identical copies if the player hasn't made any significant tech progression. 20 Years would probably be a good baseline but if you are playing with limited administration and a 20% research rate, a ship would have a much longer useful service life and could hang around for another couple decades before reaching true obsolescence
I would be very hesitant about any hard cap on years in service from a roleplay perspective, admittedly it is a minor point but in a WH40K setting for example where ships serve for hundreds or thousands of years, it would be odd to have a 20-year limit for civilian ships. Again, very minor and probably not very noticeable but all the same.
Tying the length of time to game settings, tech level, etc. is at least a better solution, therefore. I don't think such a limit is needed in practice, though, if the civilians have an effective cap on ship numbers due to "maintenance" fees then it hardly matters if they scrap ships or keep using the ones they have. Once tech advances then they can scrap the older ships for newer, better models of course, as they do now.
The other ideas in Steve's reply seem good to me.
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I am tempted to have something like civilian shipyards, or 'build capacity', or some other 'on-map' capability, but it might turn out to be a lot of work without any major gameplay impact.
If Raiders and NPRs attach and destroy these SYs, these infrastructures do have big impact on a player development/expansion, IMO.
A player could give money, upon request or voluntarily, to commercial lines to help them and rebuid their own yards and ports. Or commercial lines could lend a player (even NPR) civilian yards to rebuild their fleets, until their own infrastructures are out of work.
Maybe software implementation of this can be tricky, but I think gameplay could gain some interesting twist.
About your 5 points:
1. Agree; but you can also consider a fee for moved tonnage/people and/or for moved volume: 1 kilogram is much less than 100 kilograms, and requires less fuel to move it, but 1 kilogram of feathers, straw or cotton wool can be more voluminous than 100 kilos of metal, so requiring a larger ship (in principle)
2. I think of different incremental building costs for the different ship types: e.g. (purely cosmetic, to illustrate the concept!) colony/passengers at N^(3/2) (thanks Nuclear!), freighter/cargo at N*log(N), defence/security/armed ships at N^2 or more, costs that increase even more with the ship tonnage. About these defence ships, I can think about a security branch of a company, with its own defence infrastructures and ships to protect line sites, acting like a sort of a minor NPR
3. Together with the number of ships, also travelled distance can be included (from the start of the shipping line or in the last X months)
4. OK
5. OK (to keep its management simple)
Thank you Steve for your dedication!
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I'm going for the radical idea now, so please just consider it as such. It popped into my mind when Steve started talking about the shipyards.
What if there were a sort of "installation" that determines how much civilian tonnage a race could have? It could be linked to a new planetary installation or an existing one, such as Spaceports.
This could be player-built or "organically" expanded by the colonies, similar to how it's currently done with installations.
I understand it would be hard to code, but it would also imply using population to maintain the civilian sector, as well as resources and building capacity.
That would limit your growth based on:
Available Population
Available Resources
Build Capacity of the Colony
Eventually, a new tech line, similar to wealth expansion for financial centres, could be created to expand the maintenance capacity of the civilian sector, or again, it could tap into the existing tech for military maintenance.
I can foresee all the potential issues, mainly with multiple shipping lines wanting to build a ship as soon as there is room in the maintenance pool, and civilians consuming all our population. However, a similar limitation to the one for colony immigration/emigration might suffice. You could have the civilian sector stabilized or expanded, ensuring that populations are reserved and no new ships or infrastructure are being built.
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I'm going for the radical idea now, so please just consider it as such. It popped into my mind when Steve started talking about the shipyards.
What if there were a sort of "installation" that determines how much civilian tonnage a race could have? It could be linked to a new planetary installation or an existing one, such as Spaceports.
This could be player-built or "organically" expanded by the colonies, similar to how it's currently done with installations.
I understand it would be hard to code, but it would also imply using population to maintain the civilian sector, as well as resources and building capacity.
That would limit your growth based on:
Available Population
Available Resources
Build Capacity of the Colony
Eventually, a new tech line, similar to wealth expansion for financial centres, could be created to expand the maintenance capacity of the civilian sector, or again, it could tap into the existing tech for military maintenance.
I can foresee all the potential issues, mainly with multiple shipping lines wanting to build a ship as soon as there is room in the maintenance pool, and civilians consuming all our population. However, a similar limitation to the one for colony immigration/emigration might suffice. You could have the civilian sector stabilized or expanded, ensuring that populations are reserved and no new ships or infrastructure are being built.
http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?topic=13558.msg169730#msg169730 (http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?topic=13558.msg169730#msg169730)
Not unlike my suggestion here.
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I'm going for the radical idea now, so please just consider it as such. It popped into my mind when Steve started talking about the shipyards.
What if there were a sort of "installation" that determines how much civilian tonnage a race could have? It could be linked to a new planetary installation or an existing one, such as Spaceports.
This could be player-built or "organically" expanded by the colonies, similar to how it's currently done with installations.
I understand it would be hard to code, but it would also imply using population to maintain the civilian sector, as well as resources and building capacity.
That would limit your growth based on:
Available Population
Available Resources
Build Capacity of the Colony
Eventually, a new tech line, similar to wealth expansion for financial centres, could be created to expand the maintenance capacity of the civilian sector, or again, it could tap into the existing tech for military maintenance.
I can foresee all the potential issues, mainly with multiple shipping lines wanting to build a ship as soon as there is room in the maintenance pool, and civilians consuming all our population. However, a similar limitation to the one for colony immigration/emigration might suffice. You could have the civilian sector stabilized or expanded, ensuring that populations are reserved and no new ships or infrastructure are being built.
http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?topic=13558.msg169730#msg169730 (http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?topic=13558.msg169730#msg169730)
Not unlike my suggestion here.
Oh, okay. So, now that I have elaborated on that and merged it with your thoughts, you were recommending having a sort of Civilian HQ to pop up in suitable colonies with a given Admin level, which is expanded by the Civvies themselves, similar to how they would expand the mining complexes, right?
I can see the similarities now. However, I think if we go down this path, we will have to cap the number of companies that can be formed on any given colony, which I thought wasn't something many wanted to pursue. There will also be a problem related to the snowball effect, since even CMC can virtually expand endlessly.
I would say though, that it's intriguing and I can see the value in that, both in flavour and actual implementation, since the CMC already exist and might require only tuning the spawn rules.
Perhaps Civvies Admin could not exceed the Admin level of the Colony? That would keep it in check and in line with actual colony potential?
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Another option is replacing dividends with a percentage maintenance payment, which is modified by an admin overhead that increases as the number of ships increases - effectively limiting the rate at which a shipping line can increase in size.
I vote this
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Changing the growth rate/profit alone seems like not a great fix. That just means it will take longer for civilians to get out of hand. Unless you make them grow slower than your empire, in which case they'll stay permanently irrelevant.
So civilian shipping lines need to be limited. This limit needs to be with reference to the size of your empire, else civilians will be too good for small empires and too weak for large empires. The problem, such as it is, is that civilians are an exponential snowball of something for nothing. They do stuff you want, give you money rather than cost anything, and grow based on how awesome they were for you already. I think that instead of capping the "something", you should cap the "for nothing".
I think you already have the tool you need. IIRC colonies produce a finite amount of trade goods, based on their size. With tweaking amounts + profits, this provides a natural cap on the profit that can be made by shipping trade goods.
Cap luxury transport desire the same way--a finite amount desired for a population of a given size.
Cap colonist transport the same way. Maybe some tiny fraction of a colony's population wants to move to a different world (badly enough to pay for it) in a given year. Optionally, let the empire pay to have civilian ships move colonists beyond this limit. A simple checkbox for "subsidize colonist transport" would seem to be good enough.
After reading through the thread I really like the core of this elegant suggestion the most. Almost all other suggestions are in one way or another artificial, hardcapped or manual ways to try to balance civilian shipping which I don't think have the potential to be either as elegant, dynamic or as effective in the long run. This also removes any need of limiting number of shipping lines as when colony demand is the limiting factor 200 lines with 1 ship or 1 line with 200 ships both will provide the same service and the limitation automatically targets total tonnage/time that can be shipped, and if people are exploiting a planet-moon connection then the demand will simply be met very quickly with a very low number of ships.
This suggestion should also require very little changes to code, but mostly theoretical calculations and balance testing.
By scaling the income potential of tradegoods, colonist travel demand and luxury/passenger transports to the size of the colonies there is a built in "cap" to the system of how profitable shipping lines can become. Essentially when they reach the number of ships needed to fill 100% of the demand any addition ships will contribute no more profit (unless you as a player want to pay for additional tasks beyond this).
Another REALLY positive bonus to this is that it ensures that after enough time has come to have your shipping lines be in balance with demand they should be spread out and cover the shipping needs of the empire meaning you have all types of shipping available (and in need of protection from threats) wherever you have colonies, and not just on a few routes with the current "near infinite" demand.
If the issue is that people want to play with multi billion sized population colonies that still could see shipping lines with thousands of ships ofcourse to cover such a large demand, then it could be fairly easy to lower the demand past certain pop levels through diminishing returns (similar to pop growth) to make the shipping line numbers more manageable. There would still be hundreds of ships, but it would make sense to have a large civilian shipping sector for such massive empires.
Together with a bit better logic to ensure shipping lines deploy the correct size of ships (Small, Regular, Huge) both when building new and when deciding what demand to fill I feel confident this solution would be great.
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3) Dividends replaced by an admin overhead that increases in percentage terms based on the number of ships.
Wouldn't this just leads to more shipping lines instead if larger ones are punished?
(unless you with "number of ships" mean the total number of civilian shipping in the empire)
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Maybe some kind of Cargo / Passangers licence system (that CLS would need to buy), overall (Cargo and Passangers separately) and/or for a specific system?
or
CLS shipyards licence - how many slipways they can have and what ship size they can build?
This one is more complex to predict long therm effects.
That would give CSL some other way of spending money, therefore limit their growth.
Licence would be on overall tonage of CSL for Cargo and Passanger separately and size of a ships allowed in to a system?
Edit: system licence when set up high might result in small high speed luxury passanger ships that would have high cost to produce.
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I'd be interested in seeing civs build more expensive ships, and be reactive to what is going on in the empire, so if Raiders are popping up, maybe they build a light escort or armed freighter, if your empire is doing a lot of terraforming perhaps building those.
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I'd be interested in seeing civs build more expensive ships, and be reactive to what is going on in the empire, so if Raiders are popping up, maybe they build a light escort or armed freighter, if your empire is doing a lot of terraforming perhaps building those.
I think it's still the military job to keep enemies at bay. There could be many debates (in fact there were already) made over Civvies and Commercial ships being allowed to a small firepower: some suggested a percentage of the tonnage, some others only small calibre weapons, and others were more radical. In the end, it was agreed by most (Steve ;D )that this part works well as it is.
Revamping Civvies is welcome though, since there were issues with them in VB6 that were only partially solved by the C# version, but I guess nobody is after a complete makeover, at least not at this stage.
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I get that armed civilians would give you that East India Company vibe but for any other type of setting, it would not fit at all. Airlines do not operate fighter jets and Maersk does not own any battleships. I'm strongly against giving civilians the ability to build armed escorts or to put weapons on commercial designs or civilian ships.
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I get that armed civilians would give you that East India Company vibe but for any other type of setting, it would not fit at all. Airlines do not operate fighter jets and Maersk does not own any battleships. I'm strongly against giving civilians the ability to build armed escorts or to put weapons on commercial designs or civilian ships.
Beyond this, it also would not work very well for gameplay. If the civilian ship armaments are not very good, then they're basically useless and just a waste of civilian ships. If the armaments are actually useful, then there's no real need to defend civilians from Raiders if they can do it themselves, so a key new area of gameplay is basically trivialized. Probably best not to do that...
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I agree that the logical way to handle that is with an organic constraint, not a hard limit. My suggestions in rank order:
A. Implement a maintenance cost and track it for each CSL ship-type based on average ship age. Make the decision to retire ships based on the ship-type's profitability (income earned by the ship-type minus cost to build minus accrued maintenance cost). Once a shipping line reaches a certain age (10 years? 20 years?) start check annually whether each ship-type profitability is above a certain level act accordingly. This will naturally cycle out older ships and reduce overcapacity of specific ship-types (because idle ships cost maintenance and earn nothing, so they'll eventually be retired), with very limited computational load.
B. Allow the player to determine (on the wealth tab) how much to tax colonist ship tonnage and cargo ship tonnage (individually). This would give players the flexibility to encourage or discourage growth by giving the CSLs more or less income and hence driving growth (and/or contraction if idea A were implemented). This would only require adding two numeric fields on the wealth tab, so hopefully minimal programming work.
C. Can CSLs please be allowed to move minerals based on mineral reserve targets? Moving minerals around manually is one of my least favorite tasks, as it's pure drudge work on a repeating basis that adds little to nothing to enjoyment of the game.
D. Very strongly support the previously mentioned idea of getting more granular colony population controls. Some ideas:
D1. Ability to set TRANSPORTATION target, as in "transport 1m people here" (vs "bring people here until it hits 1M"), because then you don't risk massively overpopulating smaller colonies if your civilian lift capacity is large
D2. Ability to set a min/max target transportation RATE per year, as in "transport 1M people here per year" or "Take no more than 5m people from Earth per year"
I think these accomplish numbers 2, 3, and 5 from Steve's draft list of items in a more organic fashion, and items 1 and 4 could still make sense, although 4 is partly met by idea B.
From Steve
1) Payment based on distance in km, not transits
2) Fewer colony ships as a percentage of total ships, although perhaps not until 6+ ships built. I might also make the choice of new ship dependent on which ones are being used.
3) Dividends replaced by an admin overhead that increases in percentage terms based on the number of ships.
4) Payments affected by racial wealth multiplier
5) Have a simple retirement limit, such as 20 years, so that new ships are cycled in.
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I've taken on board comments from various people about more organic ways to control shipping line growth. Below are the changes. Everything is already coded and working.
http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?topic=13463.msg169793#msg169793
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2. Allow the player to determine (on the wealth tab) how much to tax colonist ship tonnage and cargo ship tonnage (individually). This would give players the flexibility to encourage or discourage growth by giving the CSLs more or less income and hence driving growth (and/or contraction if idea 1 were implemented). This would only require adding two numeric fields on the wealth tab, so hopefully minimal programming work.
Check the update I just posted :)
There was a bit more work involved though than just adding the extra UI elements.
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DRAT, I was too slow!
You know what though, while I liked my ideas, I'll take super-fast game updates from Steve over my specific ideas any day.
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Interesting changes! Not sure if I should continue discussing here, or move to the change discussion thread, but since we're here...
Will we still be able to set colonies as source or destination or stable?
Also, would it be possible to set taxation on shipping to be negative i.e. to offer incentives to grow their fleet, particularly early on?
Lastly, the changes don't seem to address the balance between colony and cargo ships. Would it be possible to set that taxation on a per type basis? Or is there some other way that balance has/will be adjusted?
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Interesting changes! Not sure if I should continue discussing here, or move to the change discussion thread, but since we're here...
Will we still be able to set colonies as source or destination or stable?
Also, would it be possible to set taxation on shipping to be negative i.e. to offer incentives to grow their fleet, particularly early on?
Lastly, the changes don't seem to address the balance between colony and cargo ships. Would it be possible to set that taxation on a per type basis? Or is there some other way that balance has/will be adjusted?
Source, destination, stable still work as before, but destination is overridden if pressure is 10+
I don't want to go down the subsidize route again, as that could make the situation worse.
I am going to also add some changes to how civs decide what to build, based more on what is needed, but haven't got around to that yet.
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First of all - all the changes look great!
At the topic of civilian shipping lines (hope I'm not late to the party), would it be possible to organise the civilian ships into some kind of convoys? Right now every ship is in its own fleet, which leads to tens if not hundreds of civilian fleets flying around. This would declutter the map while still being able to see the CIVs on screen and could potentially limit the late game lag, since the civilian AI would calculate the decisions for lower number of fleets.
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Really love the shipping line changes!
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These changes are so great they broke the forums for days with their sheer awesomeness.
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These changes are so great they broke the forums for days with their sheer awesomeness.
LoooL
Steve, I will be brutal, how about release the 2.6 so we can try the juicy shipping line thing?
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Right now the only way I can think of a shipping line shrinking is through very old ships being retired while there are other ships idling (or getting their ships blown up). I know in the changelogs Steve sort of shoots down the idea of explicitly modelling operating costs, but maybe that would be a good way to have civilian shipping more closely model the economic activity of the empire. The admin overhead just reduces the growth rate as the shipping line gets bigger and doesn't really do the same thing.
Also I am once again asking for mineral transport contracts (esp being able to peg it to reserve levels).
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These changes are so great they broke the forums for days with their sheer awesomeness.
LoooL
Steve, I will be brutal, how about release the 2.6 so we can try the juicy shipping line thing?
It's going to be a while before any new release. We are now 10 weeks into our motorhome trip and its going really well (currently on the Isle of Skye). Instead of returning to the Isle of Man in September, we are likely heading to Spain and parking on a beach for a few months :)
I would like to be back on my PC before doing a new release, as programming on a laptop is not ideal.
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Laptop? Laptop!
Peace (of mind) through Superior Firepower ;D
(https://i.imgur.com/KiNJd0l.jpeg)
(https://i.imgur.com/VlL1vcY.jpeg)
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I did go for an 18" laptop with 2560x1600 resolution, but ultimately its still a laptop :)
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Honestly at that size you should just go for an integrated mousepad lol.
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The general argument most people are making here is that colony ships are over-built and under-utilized, meaning that there's huge latent capacity which can get overwhelming for an empire. I see two potential parts to a solution here.
First and simplest, civilian companies should be paying maintenance costs out of their revenues, so they don't just pile up cash. You also want to split colony ships from cargo ships, so one can't cross-subsidize the other too badly. (Doesn't need to be fully split, but there should at least be some corps that do one or the other but not both.)
Second, and this will probably be harder to code/balance, I think you could use the excess capacity with people moving back and forth. Like, you don't expect every single person moving between A and B to be going in the same direction - there's not a plane route on the planet today that carries people in one direction but not the other. Tourism and bi-directional migration would give colony ships stuff to do other than just slamming people from sources into destinations en masse.
For an example of some mechanics I just threw together, maybe each planet has a colonization appeal score that'd be used to figure out where people move.
* +100 (base, as long as supported population >0)
* -1 for each percent of planetary population capacity used
* -3 for each percent of unrest
* -5 for each percent of the planet's population that's available workers (which would go negative if the planet has a shortage)
* -10 for each percent of the planet's population that exceeds infrastructure limits
* -10 for each point of colonization cost
* -10 for each other empire on the planet
* -20 for having any forced labour facilities
* +1 for each spaceport, slipway, naval HQ, and sector command
* +5 for each point of mineral accessibility
* +20 for having ancient constructs
Each five-day production tick, a percentage of the population wants to move away equal to 0.1% * (100-appeal)%, so a planet with 100+ appeal has no emigration pressure, while a planet with zero appeal could lose 0.1% * 73 ticks per year = 7.3% of its population, if sufficient transport exists to take them away.
For an example, my current Earth is at 8.12/12 billion (68%, for -68 appeal), 9.6% unemployment (for -48 appeal), no unrest, no CC, no other empires, no slavery, 3 spaceports+21 slipways+10 naval HQs (for +34 total appeal), 4.4 mineral accessibility (for +22 appeal), and no constructs. So the total appeal would be 100-68-48+34+22 = 40 net appeal. My Earth would get 0.1*(100-40)% = 0.06% per tick who want to move away (which is 4.87 million), so 0.06*73 = 4.38% per year (or 356 million) will decide they might like to move away. This number adds up over time, maybe with some decay to represent people in that pool dying or changing their minds.
When a civilian liner decides where to go, it picks from the potential destinations, and decides between them based on appeal - just a simple random selection, weighted by their appeal. Passengers also pay based on appeal. So if my only other habitable colonies are Mars (appeal 20) and Proxima Centauri 3 (appeal 60), a liner has an 60% chance of picking Proxima and a 20% chance of picking Mars, with the remaining 20% being a chance that people don't like the current options and stay put(i.e., the ship flies empty). The liner will also make 3x more if they go to Proxima, because people like it 3x better.
The important part of this is that the other planets are also below 100% appeal, and also have emigration demand building up. Mars wants to shed 7.3%*(100-20)% = 5.84% per year, and Proxima wants to shed 7.3%*(100-60)% = 3.92% per year. These numbers also pile up, and the colony ships will also be bringing some people back to Earth from there. Any planet below 0 appeal will never get anyone, and any planet over 100% appeal will never lose anyone, but the 0-100 range is pretty wide, and should include most of your colonies at any given time. (And if you don't like it, build your own colony ships and move people yourself, because those mechanics won't change.)
If this isn't enough, you could add tourism to the mix. But I can't see how to make that work especially well, and I don't think you need it.
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Design notes:
* A small colony can still have natural population growth exceed emigration pressure, unless the place is deeply negative on appeal.
* The "ships will fly empty if total appeal is too low" mechanic is to address the issue of there being no net movement early on in a game. In particular, if you only have two populated colonies, and both are producing a decent number of willing emigres, you can easily saturate a few colony ships and get zero net movement with the basic mechanics.
* There's a risk if the willing emigre population of a planet stacks up for too long and reaches 100% of planetary population, and then civilian capacity catches up and strips the place clean. I'd make that pool decay by something like like 5% of the total emigre pool per year, to represent people dying or changing their minds.
* The bit about pops paying more for more appealing destinations is intended to add a bit more to the economics of the game, and also to compensate for the longer trips that's likely to imply. Closer-in colonies will likely get filled up first, and filling up a colony will progressively lower its appeal, so the most appealing colonies will typically be newer ones that are further from your core.
* I'm not sure if the ships will return to Earth often enough to pick up a lot of net new emigres, using the mechanics above - shuttling back and forth between small colonies that all want people, and rarely actually adding new people to those worlds, would not be a good outcome for these mechanics. Perhaps if a ship can't get a full load, it will not actually make the trip it was considering - it'll instead go to a random planet that can fill it up(weighted by the size of the emigre pool on each planet, so it'll mostly go to your big core worlds).
* You might want to add some kind of "entertainment facility" whose primary purpose is to increase the appeal of a planet, possibly also reducing unrest. Playtest and see, I think.
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And then I see Steve's post, from a month and a half ago (https://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?topic=13463.msg169793#msg169793), discussing basically the same idea.
I'll take that as praise for my imagination, mild criticism for my timeliness, and more firm criticism of my unwillingness to read the full thread before posting.
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I did go for an 18" laptop with 2560x1600 resolution, but ultimately its still a laptop :)
I see excuses where there should be possibilities ::) Time for an upgrade next time the RV goes into drydock for overhauls? ;D ;)
(https://i.imgur.com/tmGi3xk.jpeg)