A Modest Proposal, or Why Cities Should Eat Pops

[HFY]

Interesting. I was not aware of any of that. Thanks for sharing!

Quite welcome.

There's a lot more data to support this idea, and I think those are a decent sample of it.

 

[Gawquon3]

Love the title, I hope most people get the reference.

It is also a sound idea that works with the new pop mechanics instead of just throwing them out. And I, for one, like the potential of this reduced pop system more.

I wonder if there is a way to incorporate tall play with this. Like if your species more Elven (low birth rate, low death rate) your urban centers are more viable and you are not allowed to have rural planets. Tall planets would not be quite as populous as wide urban ones that have those feeder rural worlds but tall planets would have better jobs with more/more efficient production. If you have too many worlds per population you'd start to lose the tall benefits.

Or, on a different note if migration treaties/democracy/federation status would come into play. You might not have enough rural worlds to grow/sustain your urban centers, but that friendly agrarian idyll neighbor might have plenty of city seekers ready to emigrate. (I'm not advocating for directly tracking pop migration between empires, it'd all be taken care of by growth modifiers, some localized, some regional, some empire, but yes, yes I do want Vicky 3)

 

[Panzerslothen]

Trigger Warning: history, capitalism.

Why have you written this ludicrously bizarre combination of words

 

[DanielPrates]

If the modern urban landscape is a population sink

I wonder where you must live. As far as I am aware, save from some very individual exceptions, modern large cities only tend do get larger over time. Recently there is some news of London losing population and it is baffling people, which shows it is not the norm (and even there, it must probably be because of how convenient it is to live in nearby metropolitan urban areas).

As far as I know 99% of major cities around the world and in all the spectrum of demographics show an increase in urban populations.

 

[HFY]

I wonder where you must live. As far as I am aware, save from some very individual exceptions, modern large cities only tend do get larger over time. Recently there is some news of London losing population and it is baffling people, which shows it is not the norm (and even there, it must probably be because of how convenient it is to live in nearby metropolitan urban areas).

As far as I know 99% of major cities around the world and in all the spectrum of demographics show an increase in urban populations.

Cities grow when people move there.

The birth rates in urban regions are below replacement, often significantly.

A few references here:

Yes, a number of sources.

Here's one from the CDC talking about data from 2007 to 2017: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db323.htm#section_1 -- no surprise the data shows a widening gap between rural and urban birth rates, with urban being much lower.

Graph from the above:

Here's one from the UN about China's fertility decline and a bit about how that's related to urabization: https://www.un.org/en/development/desa/population/events/pdf/expert/24/Policy_Briefs/PB_China.pdf

Here's one which might surprise you: Indian census data has recent total fertility rate at 2.4 in rural areas, 1.7 in urban. Replacement TFR is somewhere between 2.1 and 2.3, so that's a pretty stark contrast.


Modern medicine does a great job of saving mothers and infants, reducing infant mortality (and maternal mortality), but you need to get that zygote viable before any of that matters, and urban populations -- in spite of their proclivity for engaging in sexual activities -- do not seem to induce viable zygotes nearly as often as rural populations.

Cities IRL do tend to eat people.

 

[DanielPrates]

Cities grow when people move there.

The birth rates in urban regions are below replacement, often significantly.

A few references here:


Cities IRL do tend to eat people.

I think I speeded through your OP. You don't mean overall growth, including exodus/mobility etc., just a flat compairson between local deaths/births within people already born there. If so yeah: take me for instance. My paternal grandmother had 8 siblings, my dad has 3, I have a sister, and I have one toddler, no plans for more. Every generation it cuts in half. This must be true for most modern countries's capitals and major cities.

 

[HFY]

I think I speeded through your OP. You don't mean overall growth, including exodus/mobility etc., just a flat compairson between local deaths/births within people already born there. If so yeah: take me for instance. My paternal grandmother had 8 siblings, my dad has 3, I have a sister, and I have one toddler, no plans for more. Every generation it cuts in half. This must be true for most modern countries's capitals and major cities.

Personally I'd exclude capitals from this scheme for gameplay reasons -- you need to jump-start growth from just one planet -- but yeah, overall a large urban planet would NOT grow its own population through local reproduction, it would instead offer jobs to immigrants from backwater planets (and foreigners) and let the 3.0 migration-to-jobs mechanic fill up its carrying capacity.

Does that answer make sense to you?

 

[arosenberger14]

I like it. I don't think every planet needs to be completely filled by endgame, that just cheapens them all. This would produce a more natural way to balance out low and high value worlds longterm, keep pop counts lower, and still let people create things such as ringworlds and ecumenopoli. Could also lead to interesting combinations with diplomacy and immigration.

Of course the devs would probably need to re-balance the economic output of everything again, but hey, that's something they already need to do.

 

[DanielPrates]

Personally I'd exclude capitals from this scheme for gameplay reasons -- you need to jump-start growth from just one planet -- but yeah, overall a large urban planet would NOT grow its own population through local reproduction, it would instead offer jobs to immigrants from backwater planets (and foreigners) and let the 3.0 migration-to-jobs mechanic fill up its carrying capacity.

Does that answer make sense to you?

I think some mechanics should be thought out first. At the end, because of maior centers' pop vegetative deficit we would have a net impact on planetary growth? Surplus in some, deficit on others? Or whole pops coming in and out of planets to satisfy it?

 

[HFY]

I think some mechanics should be thought out first. At the end, because of maior centers' pop vegetative deficit we would have a net impact on planetary growth? Surplus in some, deficit on others? Or whole pops coming in and out of planets to satisfy it?

Yeah, basic-resource planets would run a surplus of pops (= rural / suburban growth), while urban and industrial planets would have a surplus of jobs (since you always want more research and alloys).

Pops would migrate to the urban and industrial planets.

The net impact of this could replace the empire-wide growth malus. (Personally I don't like the empire-wide growth malus, it feels too artificial.)

 

[Pancakelord]

In Summation

- Desirable jobs should kill pops; desirable planetary designations should kill pop growth.

If I've understood you right, IMO, the only jobs that would make sense for this kind of pop-killing are criminal and maybe mining jobs.
Sure, forges are dirty places too (even modern day ones) but to achieve pop-levels of deaths ... you'd have to be fuelling the forges with the pops lol.

Crime impacting growth (either -growth, or kill_pop events) would be a very easy way to make the mechanic go from "a joke" to "Deploy Judge Dredd, Now!" (which is probably a good way to justify the AI building police stations on every moon).

Other than that, maybe each industrial district and mining district should reduce pop growth directly, call it "pollution" or "strife" or whatever you like really. (and on thrall worlds they ADD pop growth - see: pre-industrial family size lol).

There is one other issue, I'm not totally sure of the answer to: I do not think a pop from the same species can grow and decline at the same time... normally.

• If a human pop is growing, it's because there is X base growth + any extra growth specific to their species + a weight (if mult pops in empire) which has made the game pick them as the next pop to grow.
• If you have positive species X growth, it shouldn't be able to pick that species to decline too. And vice versa.
  • So killing these pops off would either have to be handled via events/scripts directly OR
  • You need an event/script that will flag pops with "is_polluted [etc]" and tell the game, in addition to whatever you already look at for declining pops, discrete pops with this flag must always decline, too.

Without doing something like this, you'll likely screw up the pop-selection algorithm and get weird results with how species are selected for growth.

 

[Iosue Yu]

An interesting approach. But a bit too gloomy for the Stellaris players. People love to be positive...

But I would try to take this basic idea and make some changes to form a new system...

 

[Mastikator]

If I've understood you right, IMO, the only jobs that would make sense for this kind of pop-killing are criminal and maybe mining jobs.
Sure, forges are dirty places too (even modern day ones) but to achieve pop-levels of deaths ... you'd have to be fuelling the forges with the pops lol.

Crime impacting growth (either -growth, or kill_pop events) would be a very easy way to make the mechanic go from "a joke" to "Deploy Judge Dredd, Now!" (which is probably a good way to justify the AI building police stations on every moon).

Other than that, maybe each industrial district and mining district should reduce pop growth directly, call it "pollution" or "strife" or whatever you like really. (and on thrall worlds they ADD pop growth - see: pre-industrial family size lol).

There is one other issue, I'm not totally sure of the answer to: I do not think a pop from the same species can grow and decline at the same time... normally.

• If a human pop is growing, it's because there is X base growth + any extra growth specific to their species + a weight (if mult pops in empire) which has made the game pick them as the next pop to grow.
• If you have positive species X growth, it shouldn't be able to pick that species to decline too. And vice versa.
  • So killing these pops off would either have to be handled via events/scripts directly OR
  • You need an event/script that will flag pops with "is_polluted [etc]" and tell the game, in addition to whatever you already look at for declining pops, discrete pops with this flag must always decline, too.

Without doing something like this, you'll likely screw up the pop-selection algorithm and get weird results with how species are selected for growth.

It's not about killing pops but having growth rate below replacement. Realistically things that increase the rate of baby making is lack of amenities, lack of consumer goods, lack of rights.
Specialist pops that use lots of consumer goods are a net zero (at best), workers that live under economic stratification should be the ones that grow.

Funnily enough, crime should correlate with high growth. Not because crime causes growth but because poverty causes both to increase dramatically.

 

[Pancakelord]

Not because crime causes growth but because poverty causes both to increase dramatically.

Poverty might (and i'd rather not go down that path as the game doesnt model income disparity, outside of maybe CG upkeep and a few named jobs), but, I should have been clearer, when I referred to crime I meant criminal jobs themselves (which In my mind, I think of more like organised crime families), as gangs and syndicates probably don't help growth. If anything they could reduce immigration and increase emigration [which would have the effect of reducing growth rate - base growth rate - on that world].

 

[Iosue Yu]

What I would do

1. Cities -> Specialists
   1. It is often the urbanisation effort that people moving into cities from farmlands, and farmlands getting industrialised to have factories replacing farms.
2. Eating / Killing Pops -> reduced growth
   1. So at the end it's still growing but reduced.
   2. Miners and Farmers produce more growth, then Technicians (semi-urban folks), and finally other Specialists (city folks).
   3. No Base Growth.
3. Maths
   1. Let's say the rural folks produce +0.2 a Pop, a planet with 3+2 Mining and Farming lands produces 2.0 from them.
   2. Let's say the semi-urban folks produce +0.1 a Pop, a planet with 3 Generator Districts and some 4 Clerks has +1.0 from them.
   3. And the Specialists and Rulers produce around +0.05 growth. So for your starting condition with around 12 Specialists and 2 Rulers, you get around +0.35 from them.
   4. You generally then get 3.35 there. It's more-or-less the same to what we have.
   5. Now we need a stronger Migration Effect, so that you can move as much as 2.5 growth from your Capital.
   6. And then newly founded colonies should get a birth bonus of around +20%, because people simply are more free to produce babies. The Colonist Jobs, despite being Specialists, should give some +0.3 Growth, since it's their job to populate the planet.
   7. Newly founded colony will then have +0.6 "Base Growth" from the Colonist Jobs, +2.5 Migration, and +20% Bonus, around +3.1×1.2= +3.72, while your Capital is growing at +0.85.
   8. The Maths works.

 

[RobInconformista]

Trigger Warning: history, capitalism.

This thread is not a Xenophobe cookbook, but it does advocate for Pops getting eaten.


Cities Eat People

Throughout much of history, urban areas have had birth rates significantly below their replacement rate -- cities have consumed more people than they produce.

Later marriage, more dangerous working conditions, a constant influx of new dating options, more expensive real estate limiting child-rearing amongst those responsible enough to make a choice, more pollution, more distractions ... and you have whole planets like that.

If the modern urban landscape is a population sink -- a place which consumes more people than it produces -- why not use that mechanic in Stellaris?


Sources and Sinks

A source for a thing is where that thing comes from, for example Ohio is a source for humans. Humans just love to leave Ohio. That's okay because there are places for those humans to go, like Los Angeles, which will chew those poor kids up and spit out the gristle to be used as a movie prop.

This is effectively the proposed mechanic for Stellaris: pops grow on "rural" worlds, and feed their excess growth along with their Minerals and Food to the industrialized / urbanized planets, which don't grow pops.

Basically, if your planet is specialized in alloys or research, the pops on that planet do not contribute to your empire's growth.

The industrial planet behaves like a modern city, and acts as a sink for population, accepting immigration but not usually producing emigration pressure.


Why This Should Work

This should work because you want research and alloys, but also you want growth.

You can have all the growth you want -- the game should just remove the empire-wide malus and give a generous per-planet logistic curve -- because you will reduce your empire growth rate yourself, when you make those pops generate the two resources most useful in the game: alloys and research.

You want alloys and research now, so you will build as many research and industrial planets as you can, but they are the things which limit your pop growth, so you can't just slam all your pops into one and expect to remain ahead -- or, well, you can, but it's either a risky short-term gain type of plan, or it's you turning into a Fallen Empire -- and I expect AIs will do this organically, which is a bonus, but also a digression.

Anyway, the proposed mechanic in a nutshell:
- Research and Industry planets grant a hefty bonus, perhaps +30% or +50%, to the production of your key resources.
- This bonus comes with a penalty: the planet does not grow pops (either not at all, or just not efficiently).
- Finally, a new mechanic is added which occasionally kills a pop, usually an industrial job, a Worker, or a Slave.

The game becomes a balance of using pops to expand feeder colonies, vs. using pops to feed the engines of industry with blood. (And the engine of R&D.) The exponential growth is constrained voluntarily and deliberately by the player, because exponentially growing pops who don't make Alloys or Research are not useful.

I would expect this balancing act to not just be a viable way to slow-down galactic development to make it last a few hundred years, but also an interesting and satisfying mini-game in itself.

Pop assembly would work nicely in this set-up -- of course there are clone vats near the factories, we'd run out of workers otherwise.


Fine-Tuning

Instead of each pop on a planet contributing equally to planetary logistic growth, it might be possible to get desirable emergent effects by making their contributions predictably unequal.

For example, if founding species Worker pops had a particularly high growth contribution, you'd naturally buff those who avoid both robots and slaves (non-slaver Spiritualists and Xenophobes in particular).

I'm not sure this is necessary, but it might be useful.


In Summation

- Desirable jobs should kill pops; desirable planetary designations should kill pop growth.

- Migration being automatic in 3.0 means it's viable to create lumpen proletariat planets which breed pops and job-planets which employ and consume those pops.

- This mechanic ought to be able to satisfy both gameplay goals and realism goals.

But that's facts .. the forum majority have deemed that unlimited growth is correct; nevermind that players of 2.2 to 2.8 often wanted lag fixing, better automatic management features so the late game wasn't a massive loop of pause, clean up colonies economic messes, play until the alerts got too much, save and ... do something else until you can face the micro.

 

[mial42]

But that's facts .. the forum majority have deemed that unlimited growth is correct; nevermind that players of 2.2 to 2.8 often wanted lag fixing, better automatic management features so the late game wasn't a massive loop of pause, clean up colonies economic messes, play until the alerts got too much, save and ... do something else until you can face the micro.

You can have both. Auto-resettlement alone solves most of the micro. You just need somewhat-slowed growth and a habitat restriction/ban to solve most of the lag problem (source: have done it with the linked mods). And better automation *still* hasn't been properly delivered despite the fact that it's eminently doable (seriously... look at the build order for bureaucratic centers. They only have 2 actual bureaucratic buildings. Out of 16 in the order!).

 

[Pancakelord]

a habitat restriction/ban to solve most of the lag problem (source: have done it with the linked mods).

One thing i've tried is making a planet modifier "Developable Orbit" which is a pre-requisite for building habitats [within the potential block], then scatter it throughout the galaxy on bootup based on whatever ratio/cap I want (e.g. all worlds in a void dweller home system gets it, or aim for no more than 100 in a 1000 star galaxy, with 20 in each (of the 5) clusters). It works somewhat well. You can only build a hab over a world if it has the "Developable Orbit" modifier, which makes more sense to me you don't just build a moon-sized object anywhere.

 

[mial42]

One thing i've tried is making a planet modifier "Developable Orbit" which is a pre-requisite for building habitats [within the potential block], then scatter it throughout the galaxy on bootup based on whatever ratio/cap I want (e.g. all worlds in a void dweller home system gets it, or aim for no more than 100 in a 1000 star galaxy, with 20 in each (of the 5) clusters). It works somewhat well. You can only build a hab over a world if it has the "Developable Orbit" modifier, which makes more sense to me you don't just build a moon-sized object anywhere.

That's actually a great suggestion, especially if you could tie it into game settings (eg a slider for "allowable habitats," going from 0x, where this modifier would never spawn, to a 1x calibrated by PDX for "optimal" or "expected" habitat/pop numbers, to a max that's pretty much the same as we have right now).

 

[Pancakelord]

especially if you could tie it into game settings (eg a slider for "allowable habitats," going from 0x, where this modifier would never spawn, to a 1x calibrated by PDX for "optimal" or "expected" habitat/pop numbers, to a max that's pretty much the same as we have right now).

True, that would be ideal, but that would be up to PDX I guess.

Whilst its impossible to make our own slider (or at least I assume so) with "pre-galaxy" variables, It IS possible to read in existing galaxy settings and have the script scale from an array. For example, you can take in #stars AND #habitable worlds. And then use this to set a simple "upper bound" on how many habitat points can spawn randomly.

[basically the script has a counting loop, that count limit is computed from the galaxy variables, then randomly seeks out planets in the galaxy and slaps these modifiers on them, 1 per planet up to N times - maybe excluding FE/marauder systems - it all happens before you even hit the play button, it's a 1-2 second hang then no performance hit, as the event's done]. For example:​

• Let's say a 1:10 ratio for habitats to stars, multiplied by #hab worlds. so
  • 1000 stars 1x hab worlds, would give you up to 100 anchor points galaxy wide.
  • Whilst 1k stars, 0.5x hab worlds would give you up to 50 anchor points galaxy wide. 0.5x on a 200 star galaxy would give you 10 galaxy-wide.
• This would be in addition to all the planets in a voidbourne's home system starting with this modifier (and maybe regular nations original homeworlds - as it will feel a bit shit to research habitats and not be able to build even one, in the rare case youve not found an anchor yet)
• And maybe a rare reward from merchant fleets: a decision* to "clean" the orbit of any planet in owned space, adding this modifier, letting you build a habitat there (this would only happen a few times in an entire game, so it'd be a rare and somewhat valuable thing).

*it's possible to run decisions on uninhabited worlds, so long as they're instantaneous (as there is no drawn progress bar), no vanilla decisions do this. Quite a useful feature for biasing the AI in my tests though lol.

Hell, you could even make a mini popup for non voidbourne nations the first time you scan a world with one of these. "We've discovered an unnaturally stable orbital point around [Planet.GetName]. This would be ideal for a [theoretical] orbital city" - like the strategic resource popups.