Is there a reason to keep "pops" around post 2.2

[Cronos988]

With the new economic system, is there a good reason, of the thematic, gameplay or technological variety, to keep "pops" around as discrete units? It seems to me that it would make solving the pop growth issues easier if population was just a number, and fractions of population could work a job. It would also eliminate the growth spikes and presumably work well with migration and unemployment. The obvious question is, of course, how deeply the pop system is build into the game.

 

[Tim_Ward]

1) Gene modding
2) Ethics
4) Factions
5) Living standards
6) Pop Happiness

 

[permeakra]

With the new economic system, is there a good reason, of the thematic, gameplay or technological variety, to keep "pops" around as discrete units?

It would definitely be more natural to not have them. However, if you model population, there are exatly 2 ways to do that
- Keep discrete pops
- Describe state of society using distribution function, which says how much of population corresponds to this specific set of parameters.

The problem is that in the first case memory use is fairly easy to control. In the second it is insane, because you have a lot of parameters, namely
- support of each faction
- happiness
- age (well, scratch it, but still)
- traits and biological species.
- job

and so on, and so on. And for each valid set of values you need a number stored. Pops are easier to use and control.

 

[Badesumofu]

What you're really describing is a major redesign of the pop system. Given that we just had one of those and that the patch that did it isn't even really finished yet, I don't think it really makes that much sense to do another one just yet.

 

[WJLIII3]

So like....you've got 26 million energy workers, each producing .0000016 of an energy credit, and 3.288560 million of them are Queptillians, so naturally they're producing .0000024 apiece, and then 4.55 million of them of them are robots, so they're producing .0000020 but CONSUMING .00000008 apiece, so you'll want to gently encourage some 2.77 million of them to transfer over to mining jobs. Sounds way simpler.

 

[Bearinger]

I agree with this idea.
While yes it would mean a rather large rework (not to be attempted immediately), I believe the idea of pops as interactive objects has become a hindrance to the enjoyment of the game, streamlining of planetary management and game performance.

Interactive pops were required under the original tile system, but are now completely unnecessary. Even the population tab in the planetary viewer feels like its just there to soothe the anti-changers by saying "look there's still pops, they just stack now and they're really really tiny". In reality though, I've quite happily run half a dozen games without ever looking at the population tab, it is completely superfluous.

Ethics, Factions, Living standards and Pop Happiness can all be show on a per planet basis instead of a per pop basis. Which really means we just need to find an alternative solution for gene modding and racial traits.

 

[FTL neighbour]

I think you should elaborate on how "discreet" pops would be, other than that they are quite important, especially for Egalitarians and Assimilators, it's just that with the recent changes the game system doesn't/can't portray that too well, I analyzed the matter on this other topic of mine and came up with a solution that wouldn't need an extreme overhaul: https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/foru...ecies-management-and-qol-suggestions.1146832/

What do you think on what's proposed there?

 

[Ariphaos]

There's a lot of cool stuff you can build on top of discrete pops. Pops can be a source for things, etc.

We don't need discrete jobs, however.

 

[Cronos988]

1) Gene modding
2) Ethics
4) Factions
5) Living standards
6) Pop Happiness

All of these things should still work just fine. It's not like the population would be gone, they would simply grow continuously instead of in bursts.

What you're really describing is a major redesign of the pop system. Given that we just had one of those and that the patch that did it isn't even really finished yet, I don't think it really makes that much sense to do another one just yet.

.

I am not saying do it now, I am wondering whether pops are useful long term.

So like....you've got 26 million energy workers, each producing .0000016 of an energy credit, and 3.288560 million of them are Queptillians, so naturally they're producing .0000024 apiece, and then 4.55 million of them of them are robots, so they're producing .0000020 but CONSUMING .00000008 apiece, so you'll want to gently encourage some 2.77 million of them to transfer over to mining jobs. Sounds way simpler.

It's not about it being simpler, but about pop growth being smoother and less wonky with multiple species. In terms of UI, you can still shift "pops" around, I.e. move one unit of population at a time. You also don't have to have population as millions or billions. You could use the current growth points as a basis.

Whether or not this would be much more difficult to calculate for the game I don't know.

I think you should elaborate on how "discreet" pops would be, other than that they are quite important, especially for Egalitarians and Assimilators, it's just that with the recent changes the game system doesn't/can't portray that too well, I analyzed the matter on this other topic of mine and came up with a solution that wouldn't need an extreme overhaul: https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/foru...ecies-management-and-qol-suggestions.1146832/

What do you think on what's proposed there?

That seems unrelated to what I am proposing.

 

[Tim_Ward]

All of these things should still work just fine. It's not like the population would be gone, they would simply grow continuously instead of in bursts.

So, what, you're going to track each one of those for each individual in the game? Like, trillions of them?

 

[Cronos988]

So, what, you're going to track each one of those for each individual in the game? Like, trillions of them?

I am not suggesting having individuals. 1 percent of a what currently is a pop is the smallest scale you really need. And you only need to account for "fractions of pops" when it comes to jobs. Ethics are already just fractions of the population, you don't need to track the ethics of individuals, and you can always round the fractions to the nearest integer. Gene-modding is per planet. Factions can be represented by just a number, you can round it but you don't technically need to. Living standards are per species. Pop happiness is already an aggregate, based on faction and ethics.

Since almost all systems already deal with bigger groups than single pops, I don't see where simply having population represented by a rational number instead of a number of pops breaks things.

 

[JodelDiplom]

I am not suggesting having individuals. 1 percent of a what currently is a pop is the smallest scale you really need. And you only need to account for "fractions of pops" when it comes to jobs. Ethics are already just fractions of the population, you don't need to track the ethics of individuals, and you can always round the fractions to the nearest integer. Gene-modding is per planet. Factions can be represented by just a number, you can round it but you don't technically need to. Living standards are per species. Pop happiness is already an aggregate, based on faction and ethics.

Since almost all systems already deal with bigger groups than single pops, I don't see where simply having population represented by a rational number instead of a number of pops breaks things.

You would probably have liked metric time back in the day

 

[Matoro_TBS]

Because whole game is built around the unit of pop? Sure, they could change that... but why? There should be some pretty concrete reason for them to do something so drastic. Sure, they could just use some other population number system but to be fair that would be a lot less interesting and a lot more Excel.

 

[Agamemnic]

I'm a big fan of Occam's razor. Pops as discrete is better

 

[pttaylor]

Even Victoria had discrete pops, they just had many millions of them. From an implementation perspective that's probably the more realistic solution, but the processing power implications may be an issue.

 

[JodelDiplom]

Even Victoria had discrete pops, they just had many millions of them. From an implementation perspective that's probably the more realistic solution, but the processing power implications may be an issue.

No it absolutely did not have discrete pops. It had aggregate numbers