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.
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.
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