How should the game choose which pop to grow?

[klopkr]

The current system creates a super multicultural mess that ignores the jobs and climate of your planets. Its pretty much as unreasonable as it gets.

So how exactly should they grow?

Some things are obvious like making low habitability pops stop growing where they don’t belong. They can probably use the habitability % to decide whether or not the pop will grow with habitable pops having an advantage.

The rest i’m not so sure though. Should it retain grow to maintain the current demographic %? Should immigration treaties be based on how happy the pop would be on your planet? Should rapid breeders slowly take over?

 

[LockdownX7]

I'd have it weighted mostly for matching pop traits with available jobs. For example, if the only jobs available on a planet are farmers and miners, any species on the planet that has Agrarian or Industrious gets a strong bias to be selected for growth. Similarly, if a planet gets overcrowded and starts suffering from population decline, the first species to decline are the ones taking up job slots that another species on the planet can do better. This makes gene modding and/or collecting species with varied traits actually useful, as it automatically optimizes your planets over time, instead of being a complete mess.

Habitability and pop growth traits would also have an impact on species selection, but significantly weaker than job matching.

 

[Mavkiel]

The more simple they keep it the better. I'd much rather them get rid of the limit and allow populations all to grow normally. You could balance that with crime, or if you really need to limit it, punish growth rate with habitability or if its not the founder species.

Personally I favor having crime increases. Factor in number of different species + counter ethos. (Idea being xenophobes not getting along with xenophiles causing crime). So while having multiple species will be a great boon in increasing population growth, you will have to invest in enforcers or deal with crime waves.

 

[yerm]

I think we should only reply to the pop related threads with the least posts until all related threads are at about the same amount. Threads with more posters, please liberally cross post into other threads. Just try to be 60% on topic if possible (but not required).

 

[meiam89.]

Just let us stop population from moving onto specific world, just like you can favor a certain pop at the moment there could a window right next which bar certain species from specific world.

 

[pkco2]

Yea every world is like a rainbow wheel of diversity when you look at the pie chart. I was playing as the commonwealth of man and had the xenophile human faction with earth next door. They got to the point where earth was nothing but aliens and they had humans on forced decline. I took over all of their worlds, forced all the aliens on to a prison planet, and then when it revolted because there were over 600 pops on it I blew it up with the world cracker. I have to say I was pretty pleased.

 

[KonradKurze202]

I posted this in another similar thread so I'll just repost the core part:

I think a far better formula would be something along the lines of:
If Species has no representation = 0.33
If Species is underrepresented
Weight = current species representation / (1 - (ideal representation - current representation))
If species if over or equal represented
Weight = Ideal species representation + 0.25 * (current representation - ideal representation)
Where ideal representation is equal representation modified by habitability (so 3 species, with 80%, 80%, and 65% habitabilities will have an ideal rep of 35.56%, 35.56%, & 28.88%).
Weight can be multiplied by habitability.
​

This would allow less represented species to grow over time (long periods of time), but still have a much better representation of larger groups of pops repopulating quicker than smaller ones.

 

[Kent_Lang]

The worlds should grow multiple pops if there's more than 1 species growing on the planet. I don't care if it's a pain to balance, just do it!

 

[JangoBunBun]

I'd say have it check available jobs, then check which pops on the world are currently best suited to those open jobs, then grow that pop. If two pops are equally suited, the one with the most habitability/growth speed is chosen.

 

[Delthor]

Habitability makes sense. Jobs available doesn't. People don't say "Hey, there's a bunch of jobs we're genetically predisposed towards! Let's make more babies!"

 

[Scottbert]

I think we should only reply to the pop related threads with the least posts until all related threads are at about the same amount. Threads with more posters, please liberally cross post into other threads. Just try to be 60% on topic if possible (but not required).

That is the hardest I've laughed all night! Thank you, good sir!

 

[Peace Weaver]

I have to wonder, why not just let all species grow simultaneously and separately? If it's too many growth trackers to keep track of on every planet, then it can be an empire wide growth, and the new pop just gets plopped down on a lucky planet (obviously there would actually be weights to determine where it gets place)

 

[JangoBunBun]

Habitability makes sense. Jobs available doesn't. People don't say "Hey, there's a bunch of jobs we're genetically predisposed towards! Let's make more babies!"

People who excel in their fields are more likely to be financially stable/successful. People who are financially stable are more likely to have children.

Also, for machine empires with lots of specialized robots it makes sense, as the machine intelligence would look at what needs doing and build more bots to fill those roles.

 

[Althrinn]

People who excel in their fields are more likely to be financially stable/successful. People who are financially stable are more likely to have children.

I believe exactly the opposite is true... Korn’s ‘Evolution’ comes to mind.

 

[Shadowstrike]

Yeah I kind of wish that gestalt empires would automatically select the kind of drone best suited for the available jobs. I've been doing monoculture planets of climate-suitable drones without job specialization, because it's too much of a hassle to make sure that the mining drones aren't doing research because there were too many of them. In the ideal case, you should be able to just specialize your drone subspecies, and the planetary AI will pick the kind of drone that fills in the missing jobs best (or if a suitable drone is working an unsuitable job, then create the drone that does that job well so the other drone goes back to its proper role). I mean that's kind of the point of a hive...

 

[AaronWaterhog]

I have to wonder, why not just let all species grow simultaneously and separately? If it's too many growth trackers to keep track of on every planet, then it can be an empire wide growth, and the new pop just gets plopped down on a lucky planet (obviously there would actually be weights to determine where it gets place)

It would pretty much be the same as properly balancing the growing of pops individually. Except instead of (using example numbers, assuming ten species) one pop growing per year, leading to ten in ten years, you'd have ten pops growing on the ten mark, with none on years one to nine.

In other words, considerably slower.

 

[the glory of plain]

current factor number may need improvement
but the direction are better than any other possibility

 

[Ariphaos]

I've settled on this for my personal mod:

    NPop = {
       FORCED_SPECIES_PENALTY               = 0.2
       
       NEW_POP_SPECIES_RANDOMNESS           = 0.1
       NEW_POP_SAME_SPECIES_WEIGHT           = 1.0
       NEW_POP_EXACT_SPECIES_WEIGHT       = 1.5
       NEW_POP_SLAVERY_WEIGHT               = 0.5
       NEW_POP_SPECIES_DIV                   = 0.1
       NEW_POP_HABITABILITY_THRESHOLD       = 0.7
       NEW_POP_HOMEWORLD_MULT               = 2.0
       NEW_POP_ASSEMBLY_TRAIT_MULT           = 1.0
       NEW_POP_GROWTH_MOD_MULT               = 0.8
       NEW_POP_IMMIGRATION_MOD_MULT       = 0.8
       
       BASE_POP_DECLINE                   = 10
       POP_DECLINE_THRESHOLD               = 4.0
       
       RECENTLY_CONQUERED_DAYS               = 7200
   }

I didn't want 'no randomness ever', this seems to work fairly 'realistically'.

 

[Zergor]

Personally I think we should keep having only one pop growing for GP reason (10 species growing will either be way too powerful if they grow normally and if they grow at a 1/10th of normal growth it wil create the problem of having to wait 10 times more than normal to gain pops and gaining 10 at once which is horrible management wise).

The solution of randomness feel like the best and fairest.

Pool all the growth of pops and all pops have their growth/total growth to be selected (ignoring negative growths pops).
That mean that pops that multiply faster have better chances of being selected which feels normal.
Hability may be added as a weight so that artic species don't invade deserts.

I am not for a job weight. While it would help GP wise I don't feel it makes a lot of sense.

Something I like about randomness is that it can create shifts in the population over time but normally won't force equal parts of all species on all planets compared to current method.

 

[kolpo]

Habitability makes sense. Jobs available doesn't. People don't say "Hey, there's a bunch of jobs we're genetically predisposed towards! Let's make more babies!"

Yeah, job availability should instead cause internal migration. Like a brilliant programmer who moves from Michigan to California.