Let's Talk Pop Growth and Research

[WarriorofMODS]

I would like it if Sprawl did contribute to Crime prevention modifiers on Enforcers. One thing to note though is that a lot of 'Corruption' mechanics over the decades have been absolutely dreadful. Civ III...looking at you bud. I like a small modifier to Enforcers as a start. Don't make it like an Empire Wide +Crime modifier cause how could that ever possibly go wrong...

It works in Eu4, but that's because of populations not being included, so fair point.

 

[Amorenkaire]

I don't think we need to go to an empire based solution for pop growth, perhaps adopting a more grounded population growth would work instead - making population growth more determined by the number of pops on that planet, rather than a flat modifier on each planet. For your example, every pop on a planet gives .1 base pop growth, which then gets modified by technologies/jobs/ethics/etc. This mean that colonies would grow quite slowly (.1 - .2 a month until they build up their own population), and the only way to speed up that growth would be to utilize resettlement or migration.

Base game, having two colonies with your capital essentially shifts all of your capital's population growth to your two colonies anyway. And you wouldn't need to rely upon the 'new colony' growth speed malus in this situation. This also preserves local planetary conditions appropriate affecting pop growth in that context, bonuses for gaia worlds, planetary events, planetary edicts, etc, so while it slows down initial expansion, it also wouldn't be ungodly slow (well, maybe in comparison).

Wars being more deadly and land invasions more meaningful/challenging is always fine however. There should perhaps be more use for having soldiers on the planet though, if so many soldiers are going to come out of just the pop number as a militia unit. Also perhaps a land force limit modifier like naval capacity, so empires don't just swing around 50+ army fleets to occupy planets, and slowing down how long it takes to wrap up a planetary battle.

 

[Cailean]

While I find the pop growth idea... debatable at best. I like @Amorenkaire's concept better for a solution in this topic.

I certainly enjoy the idea of wars being more devastating. Like many have stated before me, it takes far too long to devastate worlds even if you have the full intention of doing so. The lowest setting concerning ships bombardment stance would perhaps leave little devastation, but anything beyond that should at least at a fair pace devastate a planet. Orbital bombardment stance I feel should matter more. I also feel choosing the 'Butcher' trait for the army leaders should also be more significant. Not saying it should be nerfed, (even though technically that's what it is) but simply that it, as it stands, doesn't feel as drastic as the text makes it sound.

I also feel as mentioned before that planets with more pops should generate additional defense, even if weaker then normal defensive armies. Something akin to militia, again, as said before. It feels strange to me that even if you don't have a fortress on a planet and it has 100+ pops it should have SOME kind of defense. Now should they be smashed by a proper force? Yes. But should the planet have only 2 defensive armies? No. That's a hell of a lot of population to be taken over easily by 3-5 armies of regular quality.

 

[WarriorofMODS]

While I find the pop growth idea... debatable at best. I like @Amorenkaire's concept better for a solution in this topic.

I certainly enjoy the idea of wars being more devastating. Like many have stated before me, it takes far too long to devastate worlds even if you have the full intention of doing so. The lowest setting concerning ships bombardment stance would perhaps leave little devastation, but anything beyond that should at least at a fair pace devastate a planet. Orbital bombardment stance I feel should matter more. I also feel choosing the 'Butcher' trait for the army leaders should also be more significant. Not saying it should be nerfed, (even though technically that's what it is) but simply that it, as it stands, doesn't feel as drastic as the text makes it sound.

I also feel as mentioned before that planets with more pops should generate additional defense, even if weaker then normal defensive armies. Something akin to militia, again, as said before. It feels strange to me that even if you don't have a fortress on a planet and it has 100+ pops it should have SOME kind of defense. Now should they be smashed by a proper force? Yes. But should the planet have only 2 defensive armies? No. That's a hell of a lot of population to be taken over easily by 3-5 armies of regular quality.

And make planetary shields actually useful. Maybe give fortresses a small protec bonus as well.

 

[strangebloke]

I do think that 'making conquest harder' does need to be different from "make conquest longer."

EDIT: to be clear, I'm talking about armies. Currently if you actually put a fortress or two down, it takes years for an army to actually conquer the world. OFC the intended thing to to do is bombard for a long time and then conquer, but I just think its worth bringing up that giving every base a free fortress would be a not-good idea under the current syst

 

[exi123]

I don't think we need to go to an empire based solution for pop growth, perhaps adopting a more grounded population growth would work instead - making population growth more determined by the number of pops on that planet, rather than a flat modifier on each planet. For your example, every pop on a planet gives .1 base pop growth, which then gets modified by technologies/jobs/ethics/etc. This mean that colonies would grow quite slowly (.1 - .2 a month until they build up their own population), and the only way to speed up that growth would be to utilize resettlement or migration.

Base game, having two colonies with your capital essentially shifts all of your capital's population growth to your two colonies anyway. And you wouldn't need to rely upon the 'new colony' growth speed malus in this situation. This also preserves local planetary conditions appropriate affecting pop growth in that context, bonuses for gaia worlds, planetary events, planetary edicts, etc, so while it slows down initial expansion, it also wouldn't be ungodly slow (well, maybe in comparison).

Wars being more deadly and land invasions more meaningful/challenging is always fine however. There should perhaps be more use for having soldiers on the planet though, if so many soldiers are going to come out of just the pop number as a militia unit. Also perhaps a land force limit modifier like naval capacity, so empires don't just swing around 50+ army fleets to occupy planets, and slowing down how long it takes to wrap up a planetary battle.

I have read many posts and topics around pop growth after the release of 2.2. Many of them suggested complete overhauls of pop growth. While an empire wide growth pool sounds very appealing to me, smaller and effective changes to the existing system could work as well. I guess many players will take anything to fix it and make it easier to play with.

 

[BlackUmbrellas]

I have read many posts and topics around pop growth after the release of 2.2. Many of them suggested complete overhauls of pop growth. While an empire wide growth pool sounds very appealing to me, smaller and effective changes to the existing system could work as well. I guess many players will take anything to fix it and make it easier to play with.

One change that'd help a lot would be a fix for the "percentage of zero is zero" issue with Population Controls.

Planets are SUPPOSED to contribute their POP growth to immigration growth on other worlds if you turn on Population Controls... but since that sets POP growth to zero, there's nothing to turn into immigration growth.

 

[exi123]

One change that'd help a lot would be a fix for the "percentage of zero is zero" issue with Population Controls.

Planets are SUPPOSED to contribute their POP growth to immigration growth on other worlds if you turn on Population Controls... but since that sets POP growth to zero, there's nothing to turn into immigration growth.

Population Controls on planets are NOT generating growth which can emigrate. The game gets this absolutely right. Under PC the population is staying where it is. Right now we switch these on that planets dont produce endless, unemployed pops. If you dont want to micro, stop growing.

We need mechanics which kick immediatly and automatic in when planets run out jobs/housing/amenities. Best thing would be that the total growth is converted to emigration and when everything is filled, so your whole empire is overcrowded, population controls start automatically.

Keep in mind that this way the amount of pops in empires will decrease immensely in the lategame. This would help ai's and performance as well.

 

[BlackUmbrellas]

Population Controls on planets are NOT generating growth which can emigrate. The game gets this absolutely right. Under PC the population is staying where it is. Right now we switch these on that planets dont produce endless, unemployed pops. If you dont want to micro, stop growing.

Nope.

If you read the tooltips, they're clearly SUPPOSED to reduce growth by 90% and shunt that 90% to other colonies. This would mean reduced micro, since it would mean less resettling.

Currently, discouraging/controlling growth is a sucker's bet for most of the game - you're better off to keep those POPs growing and manually resettle them elsewhere to take advantage of the workers. But if discouraged/controlled growth did what it was supposed to and shunted that POP growth elsewhere, you wouldn't need to resettle those workers manually. They'd just grow where you needed them.

 

[mrt1212]

Nope.

If you read the tooltips, they're clearly SUPPOSED to reduce growth by 90% and shunt that 90% to other colonies. This would mean reduced micro, since it would mean less resettling.

Currently, discouraging/controlling growth is a sucker's bet for most of the game - you're better off to keep those POPs growing and manually resettle them elsewhere to take advantage of the workers. But if discouraged/controlled growth did what it was supposed to and shunted that POP growth elsewhere, you wouldn't need to resettle those workers manually. They'd just grow where you needed them.

I know that not everyone can just up and 'resettle' pops but I ask, if you are playing this game without that ability baked in, why are you torturing yourself with how the game works?

 

[exi123]

Nope.

If you read the tooltips, they're clearly SUPPOSED to reduce growth by 90% and shunt that 90% to other colonies. This would mean reduced micro, since it would mean less resettling.

Currently, discouraging/controlling growth is a sucker's bet for most of the game - you're better off to keep those POPs growing and manually resettle them elsewhere to take advantage of the workers. But if discouraged/controlled growth did what it was supposed to and shunted that POP growth elsewhere, you wouldn't need to resettle those workers manually. They'd just grow where you needed them.

"Declared Population controls modifier added: No Population Growth on Planet.
Emigration Push +100"

Declining pops will decline faster but growth is stopped completely. Keep in mind that different types of empires have different types of population controls. I Agree with you that pop growth is so important that popluation controls should never be used anyway, most players do it for pure convenience. And thats the point: people find resettling so tedious that they take the economcally drawback to get a better gaming experience. I call that poor gamedesign.

 

[BlackUmbrellas]

I know that not everyone can just up and 'resettle' pops but I ask, if you are playing this game without that ability baked in, why are you torturing yourself with how the game works?

I'm not "torturing" myself with anything.

I'm pointing out that the game has a bug in it. It says it's supposed to do one thing, but the math that drives how that thing is supposed to work has not been executed properly, and if the math was fixed so the bug no longer existed it would improve the game.

 

[mrt1212]

I'm not "torturing" myself with anything.

I'm pointing out that the game has a bug in it. It says it's supposed to do one thing, but the math that drives how that thing is supposed to work has not been executed properly, and if the math was fixed so the bug no longer existed it would improve the game.

I was being cheeky

 

[UltimateTobi]

Nope.

If you read the tooltips, they're clearly SUPPOSED to reduce growth by 90% and shunt that 90% to other colonies. This would mean reduced micro, since it would mean less resettling.

Currently, discouraging/controlling growth is a sucker's bet for most of the game - you're better off to keep those POPs growing and manually resettle them elsewhere to take advantage of the workers. But if discouraged/controlled growth did what it was supposed to and shunted that POP growth elsewhere, you wouldn't need to resettle those workers manually. They'd just grow where you needed them.

This would immensely aid the AI if it worked like intended, since the AI loves enabling Pop Growth Control.

 

[Agathors]

Let’s talk about two systems I think are in desperate need of major changes for the next big update: pop growth and research.

If you don't want to read this monster of a post, I've provided a TLDR at the bottom.

The Problems:

The fundamental problem is that the number of pops is by far the most significant determinant of an empire’s strength. Yes more populous empires should be stronger, but as of now the relationship is so strong that it dominates all other strategic considerations and interacts poorly with other mechanisms in the game. Consider:

• All advanced resource production scales linearly with pop number. Alloys, consumer goods, unity, and research are all determined by how many pops are working their jobs. Research rate and unlocking traditions are now very strongly tied to population size since bureaucrats prevent tech and tradition costs from increasing with sprawl. Consequently, it is now easy for the player to have researched all technologies by 2300, and be very deep into the repeatables by the default endgame. Additionally it counteracts diplomatic attempts to counter large empires as one large empire will research technologies faster than a research federation of several small ones with an equal total number of pops.
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Essentially this combination of factors makes it is very easy for the player (or theoretically a large AI that could manage its economy) to snowball exponentially. On the other hand, if an empire is small and weak the only possible way to keep up (let alone pull ahead) is to try and find a way to grow faster (which the AI is pretty bad at). This tends to lead to a rather deterministic game progression where the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, where the AI cannot recover from setbacks, and once you get ahead as a player you will always be ahead of everyone else by a wider and wider margin. Additionally, it unbalances high difficulty settings by making it hard to survive in early game, but extremely easy once you hit mid to late game. These factors strongly promote situations where the player finishes the tech tree and is eons ahead of every other AI in technology by mid to late game and all that remains to do is to wait for the crises to show up.

There are also significant detriments to gameplay from the current system of pop growth:

• Because each planet is steadily churning out new pops, building slots are pop-locked, and automation options are extremely poor, the player has to micromanage each planet to build new buildings and districts and/or resettle pops as they grow in. This works OK when you’re small, but at large empire sizes becomes extremely tedious.
• The “encourage growth” and “distribute luxuries” decisions are micromanagement nightmares.
• Minority races grow unrealistically quickly. While this is better than before they are still substantially over represented in pop growth. This makes your starting race choice matter less; once you get some pops with a different habitability preference via diplomacy or conquest you will easily be able to colonize almost all planets within your borders. Furthermore, I find it rather annoying when you let one pop with the right planet preference into your empire and suddenly all your planets are growing that species.

The Solutions:

There are three broad changes I’d like to propose to fix these issues. I think there’s a lot that more that could be done to improve the economy and research system, but to keep the proposed changes realistic I’m trying to avoid ideas that’d require a complete rework of the entire economic system (again!). Also I’m going to avoid discussing ethics and internal politics; while those absolutely need improvement too that’s another topic for discussion.

[...]

Third: Increase high-tier tech costs and add technology diffusion. The quickest fix to combat tech snowballing would be to make tech costs scale with sprawl again. However, this would make bureaucrats useless. Instead, I propose to rebalance the cost of higher tier technologies (I’ve made a mod that does this already) to make tech progression more in line with earlier versions of the game where you’d be getting into the repeatables near 2400.

However, this won’t combat the issues of larger empires teching up much faster than small ones. To do this, I would add a mechanism for technology to diffuse to neighbors. The base cost of a non-rare technology should be reduced if one or more neighboring empires has researched it 10 or more years ago, proportional to the time since it was researched up to a maximum of, say, 95% at 50 years. Diplomatic relationships such as commercial, migration, defensive pacts, or being in a federation will increase the diffusion, while empires with xenophobic ethics or the enigmatic engineering ascension perk will provide less of a tech cost reduction to their neighbors. Also change research agreements to provide a 25% tech cost reduction instead of rate increase. The galactic community could also have a set of laws that increase or reduce tech diffusion.

With this system, large research focused empires will still be able to stay substantially ahead of the curve, but the AI will be less likely to fall too far behind. It'd be more analogous to EU4 in terms of the distribution of technology. Alternate strategies like focusing on diplomacy or military and relying on technology diffusion for research will be possible. Xenophobic empires could get policies that let them choose between trying to steal the xeno’s tech at risk of divergent ethics spreading or their own tech leaking out, or trying to cut off technological exchange in both directions. Xenophiles with a strong diplomatic focus could try and increase tech diffusion so that their allies are all advanced.

The main benefit from this are that AI empires and diplomacy should matter more near endgame. Even if the player is still the leader in tech, ideally the AI should only be a few generations behind and still able to do something when the fallen empires awaken or the crisis hits or be able to band together and provide (on paper) a counterbalance for a player on a conquering spree. On a meta level it would nicely tie diplomacy into research much more impactfully than it is now.


Conclusions:

Taken together these three ideas should have several beneficial effects on both singleplayer and multiplayer games. To rattle off a list:

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• Empire technological advantage will depend less strongly on number of pops. Larger empires will not be penalized for growth, while small or less tech-focused empires will be able to stay within spitting distance more easily.
• AI empires will be more relevant in the endgame.
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• Alternate playstyles such as intensively developing a few worlds or concentrating on things other than tech will become more practical.
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• Lategame micromanagement will be significantly reduced.

TLDR:

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• Add tech diffusion to promote non-tech focused playstyles and help smaller or less tech focused empires (i.e. the AI) remain relevant into the endgame.

The problem with science that most strategy game and particularly 4x have is they design their science progression in their game with the same philosophy that they do in IA development. Like with the IA where they will just add astronomical cheats in order to compete with the player at best or to allow the IA to play the game at it worst, they will add penalty to your scienctific progression as to balance the out of control progress rate (particularly painful for sim-city player that shudder at the eXpansion of a 4x) that this flawed mechanic create and like with IA they will produce others set of issues like the vassal problem and so ones. Science should not be a quantifiable processed resources produced from raw mineral, energy or consumed good to refine it into new technologies as what Stellaris do. It should have the same mechanic that Distant World and archaeological site do, minus the linear progression ( It could be based on MTTP function like reinforcement chance in HOI 4). Then you can make science team (that should not only be restricted to scientists and have multiple subordinate leaders in spirit to hoi2 tech system) act like sector/fleet and not be restricted to 3 research slot with will have great benefit and opportunity to expand into the game like federation mechanic.

 

[Don_Quigleone]

In terms of Science, the issue now is that Empire Sprawl is too easily controlled. If it was a bit tighter, then large empires wouldn't gain such economies of scale.

The issue is the math, a bureaucrat can reasonably produce 10 Admin Capacity, while a single new colony with 4 pops in a newly occupied system is 10 admin cap. As it is, if you're adding a new colony, you only need 1 or 2 pops to upkeep the increased administrative load.

Instead, I would dramatically increase base Admin Cap, but shift the math such that once you go a little beyond the base cap, the math, between the penalty of sprawl, and the potency of bureaucrats, is such that expanding your empire is initially a net negative for your empire's research, and maybe requires 20-30 pops on the planet before it's a net benefit for your research.

In this way, tall empires will be able to devote most of their resources to research and development, but wide empires will have to deal with a large overhead of bureaucrats, or just give up on being as fast tech wise.