Are there any plans from devs to change how pop growth works?

[Crowarior]

Your current planet population should affect the pop growth of each species that live on that planet. I think that all species on a single planet should have their own growth bar. That way dominant species wont get cucked by a single xeno pop that somehow arrived on the planet.

 

[Kahldris]

I really hope so, if not hopefully a modder will step up and set it right...

Paradox should really do it.

 

[AppleBeam]

Thanks Blorg the political DLC is not out yet.

"In response to a single xeno pop arriving on your planet, your entire government is shut down, and the xenophobic faction demands you to start building The Space Wall megastructure".

 

[sillyrobot]

I really hope so, if not hopefully a modder will step up and set it right...

Paradox should really do it.

Modding it is pretty straightforward; there's a bunch of variables controlling its behaviour in defines.txt. I expect there's a bunch of mods already available for it.

 

[mcolder]

Yea and the 20% penalty to force growth of a specific species is silly.

 

[wundte]

Yea and the 20% penalty to force growth of a specific species is silly.

Yeah, especially when you have egalitarian faction and population controls make you lose influence, so you pay double price for no reason at all.

 

[strangebloke]

In order to streamline things and make things more reasonable, there's an easy solution:

Create a master matrix of Pop traits to jobs. 'x trait makes you .4 better at y job'. This is very easy to do in an objective manner. Communal makes you a little better at every job. Strong makes you a better worker. Every pop race then can have a value calculated for it's attraction to a given job. Every planet then gets an average attraction level for each pop type, based off of the jobs already on that planet, and the habitability of that planet for that pop.

Since a city planet or habitat or Gaia world has 100% habitability, and differences between most jobs are small, many wotlds will still be very cosmopolitan. But the science world is a world of intelligent species, thank you very much.

You get rid of the current job weight mechanic. When a new pop enters the work force either because its place of employment was demolished or because it's a new pop, it takes the highest strata job available.

When a new job is opened, it's filled by whatever pop has the highest aptitude for it, but only if that pop is of equal or lower strata and and only if it's aptitude for it's new job is higher than it's old one.

This means that a newly unemployed/created pop is going to have very bad options. But since specialist and ruler jobs are constantly being created, pops will be able to bubble up through the ranks if they're high aptitude.

Finally, if jobs are eliminated, the least apt pops with that job are released into the workforce first.

All in all this leads to much more naturally pleasing worlds. But the other benefit is that it relies on event based calculations. When a planet produces a pop, it assigns a job, then calculates the growth weight of all pops that can grow there. When a building is demolished, a dozen pops recalculate their position.

No constant recalculations required.

Obviously this is just my 5 cents, but I think this would fix most of my problems with the game, from a design and performance perspective. (Balance and bugs are another matter)

Would make the appearance of a new race (via Gene/robo modding) a pretty hectic experience though.

 

[Adolf - Finite War]

While they are at it they also need to do something about the hybrid madness at least merging the Human-Blorg abominations with the Blorg-Human abominations.

 

[SteelCrow]

Modding it is pretty straightforward; there's a bunch of variables controlling its behaviour in defines.txt. I expect there's a bunch of mods already available for it.

Balancing the numbers is the real trick, and iteration is very slow since we have to wait for each new Pop to finish growing.

 

[sillyrobot]

Balancing the numbers is the real trick, and iteration is very slow since we have to wait for each new Pop to finish growing.

Sure! and each person will have a different idea of what a perfect growth distribution is. It's easy enough to take a stab and make it personally *better* than the choices the devs made though.

Here are my arbitrary first choices. They're working well enough that I haven't bothered to refine further:

NEW_POP_SPECIES_RANDOMNESS = 0.25 # was 1.0 The higher this is, the more random species selection of new pops will be
NEW_POP_SAME_SPECIES_WEIGHT = 1.0 # unchanged. The higher this is, the more new pops will be weighted by number of exact same species pops
NEW_POP_EXACT_SPECIES_WEIGHT = 0.5 # unchanged. The higher this is, the more new pops will be weighted by number of same or subspecies pops
NEW_POP_SLAVERY_WEIGHT = 0.5 # unchanged. The higher this is, the more new pops will tend to be balanced between enslaved and non-enslaved species
NEW_POP_SPECIES_DIV = 0.05 # was 0.5 The higher this is, the more planets will tend to grow species that are underrepresented on the planet
NEW_POP_HABITABILITY_THRESHOLD = 0.65 # was 0.6 If habitability is under this, apply exponentinally increasing penalties to new pop weight
NEW_POP_HOMEWORLD_MULT = 2 # unchanged. Pops have increased weight for growing on their homeworld
NEW_POP_ASSEMBLY_TRAIT_MULT = 2 # was 1 Extra weight per trait point for assembled pops
NEW_POP_GROWTH_MOD_MULT = 0.66 # unchanged. How much does species growth mod trait matter for new pop weight
NEW_POP_IMMIGRATION_MOD_MULT = 0.5 # was 1 How much does species immigration growth mod trait matter for new pop weight (when there is immigration)

 

[Zenopath]

I still hope devs will automate the population management system a bit.

Here´s a random thought, what if you had a policy option called ¨allow migrant workers¨ which would allow unemployed populations to move, of their own accord to a planet with 60%+ habitable world with open job slots of their type (worker/specialist). It already happens automatically with rulers when you enslave races, why not let the little people do it? Maybe this policy would cost you something to enable, or maybe it could be an edict, to balance the 100 energy per pop savings, but it would be worth it, from a game play perspective to give that option to save you on micromanagement.

 

[Badesumofu]

I hope and expect that they do plan to change it. But I also think there are higher priority fixes right now - get the game functioning first and then look at redoing things that are weird and counter-intuitive but WAD.

 

[KingAlamar]

It would be nice to add other factors:

• Habitability .... Handy to minimize habitability penalties
• Available Jobs & Job types [Handy if you have Slaves but don't have any jobs they could perform vs. a shortage of specialists]
• Ascended [Handy if you want to prioritize building of pops that have ascended]

 

[sillyrobot]

It would be nice to add other factors:

• Habitability .... Handy to minimize habitability penalties
• Available Jobs & Job types [Handy if you have Slaves but don't have any jobs they could perform vs. a shortage of specialists]
• Ascended [Handy if you want to prioritize building of pops that have ascended]

Habitability is already there: NEW_POP_HABITABILITY_THRESHOLD. It's not a guarantee, but the penalties to pop type weight seem substantial. I typically run multiple species with different preferred environments and there is very little "wrong" species being constructed. I did up the threshold slightly, because I had pop at 60% habitability showing up otherwise.

The rest would be handy, but better if one could dynamically alter them to local conditions as opposed to changes with galactic scope.

 

[KingAlamar]

Habitability is already there: NEW_POP_HABITABILITY_THRESHOLD. It's not a guarantee, but the penalties to pop type weight seem substantial. I typically run multiple species with different preferred environments and there is very little "wrong" species being constructed. I did up the threshold slightly, because I had pop at 60% habitability showing up otherwise.

The rest would be handy, but better if one could dynamically alter them to local conditions as opposed to changes with galactic scope.

Because all growth is "local" my thoughts are that local conditions should be what we primarily look at. Then again being able to prioritize species [at a galactic scope] would be another nice nudge in the right direction.