Orbital habitats?...

[db48x]

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.

[nuclearslurpee]

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.

[Droll]

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.

[Ektor]

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.

[nuclearslurpee]

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%.