A thought on pop increase design fundamentals

[Tannhäuser Cake]

The core design of Stellaris pop increase mechanics can be summed up like this:

• Each colony produces pop growth at a rate that is based on a "base growth" (specific numbers vary depending on circumstances, but the base value is 3).
• From the beginning or shortly thereafter, each colony can also produce pop assembly at a rate that is comparable to the base growth (specific numbers vary depending on circumstances, but often in the 2-4 range).
• The two types of growth do not affect each other, and pop assembly is an "optional" addition on top of pop growth. Colonies and empires that do not assemble pops are immediately at a disadvantage, effectively making pop assembly a non-choice.
• Pop assembly usually requires a building slot and one or two jobs, while allowing the production of a chosen pop template. This template likely has desired traits, which the natural pop growth template may miss, and it can also be from a template in servitude to the main template.
• Essentially: pop assembly not only (approximately) doubles the pop increase rate, it also enables creating a populace composition with much more versatile traits, and a greater economic optimization of colonies.

What if there was instead a pool of "pop increase capacity" that we could distribute between pop growth and pop assembly?

• Essentially: if a colony has access to both means of pop increase, the pop increase capacity would be distributed between them; if the colony only has access to one of them, it would receive the entirety of the pop increase capacity. The distribution settings would presumably be 10/90, 25/75, 50/50, 75/25 and 90/10 (percents).
• Basically, it would be possible to choose a desired ratio of growth vs assembly, depending on the target pop composition. Some empires may prefer a 50/50 ratio to leave all menial jobs to assembled pops, while others may prefer a ratio of 75/25 since the naturally born pops are talented at some worker-level jobs and only want to leave some to the assembled pops, while yet other empires may prefer a 10/90 ratio as it would leave most of the naturally born pops in wealthy ruler jobs (Isaac Asimov example: Solaria).
• The chosen ratio would essentially reflect the government or society choosing which ratio of pop increase it wants to facilitate and support.

It seems to me there should be no fundamental balance issue with a game design like that. And it would be nice to be able to set different ratios, as well as being able to go "all in" for either pop growth or pop assembly, rather than being punished by the game for not doing both in the nearly equal measure that the game currently prescribes for us. It would be nice to see more radically different societies in Stellaris. Currently, the "10% naturals, 90% robots" ratio is unachievable without actively harming yourself, and the chances of seeing AI empires end up like that are close to nil.

If pop increase was designed as per the above, it would also enable a frequently mentioned origin idea: an empire consisting only of rogue robots, with "individuals" rather than a central machine intelligence. Under current game mechanics, such an empire would fall far behind in the pop count due to lacking pop growth; with a pop increase pool, they could instead keep up using only pop assembly.

(Under the above mentioned design, the pop increase capacity's value could even be made a game setting.)


Thoughts?
Would it work?
Would it be fun?
Are there any major issues I have overlooked?

 

[HFY]

Under current game mechanics, such an empire would fall far behind in the pop count due to lacking pop growth;

Clone Army has this exact issue, and they don't need a special work-around to be a great origin.

They deal with it in a variety of ways, for example getting pops from other species which grow naturally.

As a genocidal Purifier, you'll have a more difficult game, but you presumably knew that going in.

 

[HyperLordBender]

Pops should really just be removed. They are the reason late game lag even exists

 

[HFY]

Pops should really just be removed. They are the reason late game lag even exists

I mean, they're also the reason the game exists.

How do you make species fun & interesting if you don't have pops?

Serious non-rhetorical question -- it may be possible, but it's not obvious how, and nobody yet has posted a comprehensive way to keep Stellaris a multi-species game where species matter -- yet without Pops.

 

[Shaeliss]

Serious non-rhetorical question -- it may be possible, but it's not obvious how, and nobody yet has posted a comprehensive way to keep Stellaris a multi-species game where species matter -- yet without Pops.

As I'm not good with tech, I have no idea how it actually works, but from my limited understanding, I have heard the Production Revolution mod uses some weird trick to get roughly the same result as the pop system, and it only keeps pops around for template purposes...

Can anyone explain to me (and everyone else) how that mod works under the hood like I'm 5? Understanding how and why that mod works might help explaining how and why we could or could not do something similar with the actual pops?

This may or may not be a workable solution, and I would really want to know why or why not. Thank you all in advance for enlightening me (and everyone else).

 

[Abdulijubjub]

As I'm not good with tech, I have no idea how it actually works, but from my limited understanding, I have heard the Production Revolution mod uses some weird trick to get roughly the same result as the pop system, and it only keeps pops around for template purposes...

Can anyone explain to me (and everyone else) how that mod works under the hood like I'm 5? Understanding how and why that mod works might help explaining how and why we could or could not do something similar with the actual pops?

This may or may not be a workable solution, and I would really want to know why or why not. Thank you all in advance for enlightening me (and everyone else).

From reading their Steam page, it sounds like they're essentially doing the following:

• Add a new planet attribute, called manpower, which is local to planets.
• Define jobs as producing (1+allocated manpower)*output, instead of just their output.
• Make buildings produce one job (or possibly one job per species) and add manpower capacity (ex. a fully built up research lab gives one job that can be buffed by up to 5 manpower and/or 2 fully built research labs give 1 job and 11 capacity).
• Convert unemployed pops into manpower automatically.
• Now, instead of having 2 pops that work a researcher job making 4*<modifiers> each, you instead have one pop working a researcher job making 4*(1+1)*<modifiers> (and doing the same for CG upkeep), giving you the same output, but with the game only computing job weights/modifiers/happiness for one pop.

I'm not sure how it handles:

• parking high output template pops in a job and converting low output (but fast growing) pops into manpower. Maybe it has separate manpower counters per template?
• strata happiness and the impact of those on planet crime/stability.
• ethics, factions, and ethics shifts
• more unique templates on the planet than you have jobs
• converting manpower back into pops when you open up more jobs.
• etc.

But I can envision reasonable solutions for all of those; it's just that I didn't see an implied solution in their description.

I haven't actually played the mod, for what it's worth.

Sounds like it could have some issues. But the general idea of "compress all pops of the same species/stratum into a single pop, with multipliers to make it economically equivalent, then only do all the engine's calculations on a single pop" seems legit. If it gives you things like continuous ethics (ex. if 30% of your pops should be pacifist based on their attraction, then your exemplar pop gets happiness bonus like it's 30% pacifist and whatever else), then that might be nice, beyond the performance improvement.

But in terms of performance: barring the ethics thing, this doesn't sound like anything that couldn't be done by deduping pops by template and temporary modifiers and just doing all those calculations once.

 

[aadf97799c]

so many other game have already proved any thing other than each city get their own growth doesn't work

the problem right now is that ethic and happiness of each pop are individual tracked

make ethic and happiness pie chart and pop does nothing other than take a job slot would be the best fix

 

[Shaeliss]

From reading their Steam page, it sounds like they're essentially doing the following: (left just enough to be able to do a reply with your post linked)

Thank you. This makes a lot of sense now.