Manpower in Stellaris

[Ziffallo]

Seeing the numbers for flavour is definitely nice, but having a limiting mechanic based around manpower and ship crews like in EU4 would definitely be out of place, and unsuitable for a sci-fi title like Stellaris

Agreed.

 

[Zaku]

Manpower does make sense as a mechanic for a game with a Warhammer 40k vibe. Probably not in Stellaris, however, the time scale is so much longer.

Warhammer 40K is the worst example in this case because even the smaller races such as the Tau Empire have hundreds of planets and colonies. Even they have a population of hundreds of billions. Races/factions such as the Imperium, Orks, Chaos, etc have unlimited manpower. The bottleneck in that universe is always technology and equipment.

"Hundreds of billions of hands ready to die for our mission in the cold, unforgiving space" - Imperial Navy

 

[mrinku]

Three pages and no-one has objected to the term "manpower"?

How utterly racist.

 

[HighGain]

I think it really comes down to your individual sci-fi vision and preferred lore. Many envision massive galactic wars fought with relatively small numbers of actual organic military personnel... lots of expensive hardware... lots of automation. If today we already have warships and planes costing 10 figures, it's not too hard to think that in 200+ yrs military hardware would be so expensive in resources that a civilization could afford but a relative few... and a few highly skilled professionals to operate them. In Stellaris, we see pops emulating billions upon billions... but fleet engagement are below 100 or 200 ships (from current videos). In this vision, most casualties would actually come from civilian populations caught in bombardments and planetary invasions. Others have a different vision where wars are militarily manpower intensive affairs... requiring the direct participation of trillions in uniform. Though I prefer the former vision, neither is right... this is sci-fi.

As far as a Stellaris military manpower #s mechanic, I'm thinking more along the line of:

- Stellaris looks great so far... I'm very excited... and I usually don't play 4X.
- Stellaris has so many possible paths to make it better... so many discussed in this forum alone.
- On my Stellaris patch, mod, DLC wishlist, where does this rank? What do I want to see first?
- Even if Paradox implemented all the great ideas from this forum... I'd then have to clear out a room and install racks of equipment to run Stellaris... so adding game complexity needs to be proportional to the added fun such complexity would bring... a matter of priorities.

For me, a military manpower #s mechanic falls fairly low on my list, though I'd help support if for those who feel strongly about it. But in terms of military manpower and fun effect on the game, I'd first like to implement experience / skill levels for ship crews and armies; similar to the concept I read in the HOI4 dev diaries on army divisions: Green / Trained / Experienced / Veteran. For HOI4, it even mentioned the ability to spend time and resources to train green units up to the trained level. I feel this would add greater game depth as the true strength of enemy fleets and armies becomes harder to estimate. An enemy fleet stack estimated at 5K (based on ship #s, type, and tech) could be under or over estimated if the average fleet skill level is veteran or green. In addition, loosing experienced / veteran ships & armies becomes more painful as it takes far longer to recoup the lost experience levels than just building / recruiting more units. Players also face strategic decisions of either rushing green ship crews and armies into combat or allotting the energy credits and time for them to upgrade to at least the trained level before their first engagement. Decisions... decisions.

Regardless... I'll get hours & hours of enjoyment from Stellaris soon enough.

Edit: Replace term manpower with organic personnel...

 

[stumason]

I don't know. Let me hit your ships with a microwave laser (which would literally fry your crew, and leave the ship intact) and then we'll talk about how important crew numbers are

Your puny microwaves wouldn't even penetrate the hull, much less the shields!

 

[stumason]

Neither did nations run out of people in EU times.It is a good mechanic to make war have strategic consequence.

Actually, they did. There is only a finite amount of men a country can realistically bring to a fight, even less the more training is required. It's why the French cut off the fingers of English Bowmen - they took years to train and couldn't cimply be replaced.

Likewise, in WW1, many countries were close to the point where they couldn't keep up with the amount of losses, the UK and France included. It's only because Germany broke first that they lost and they broke because they couldn't keep up with supplying their front line armies anymore.

That said, I don't want manpower in Stellaris. It's a mechanic I particularly hate in EU.

 

[Turin the Mad]

Three pages and no-one has objected to the term "manpower"?

How utterly racist.

Critterpower doesn't quite have the same 'zing'. All are equally tasty.

 

[The_Red_Star]

orks - endless manpower supply

Tyranids - HAK HAK HAK

Necrons - being able to teleport back to tombs for repairs when badly damaged causes them to take very few losses compared to other races

Chaos - effectively unlimited

etc etc. With the exception of the dying race of the Eldar and Dark Eldar who would both be better represented as fallen empires rather than full races in the stellaris sense the only real race that doesn't possess this unlimited source of manpower is the Tau

and lore wise the tau are screwed by the tyranids that are heading right towards them with the largest hive fleet so far, last time i checked.

so A) is a pretty awful argument, 40k lore has the vast majority of races having nearly impossible to deplete manpower reserves

Also, the Necrontyr Empire was larger than the Imperium before they all became Robomummies; there could very well be more sleeping Necrons than there are humans. So the Necrons aren't going to run out of robomummies and canoptek robots to commit to campaigns any day soon.

 

[mrinku]

In fact the REAL limiting factor of crewpower isn't sheer population numbers, but the ability to train and maintain a pool of skilled operators. If you lose most of your able spacers in one disaster, you might face years before even newly trained academy kids are up to speed, even if your massive industrial output can replace the hardware in months and you have ten times the number of potential trainees as your opponent.

Of course, that's a worst case scenario. Hopefully there's crew rotation and a decent ready reserve of veteran spacers. But those things aren't cost free.

 

[Avatar1968]

[QUOTE

For me, a military manpower #s mechanic falls fairly low on my list, though I'd help support if for those who feel strongly about it. But in terms of military manpower and fun effect on the game, I'd first like to implement experience / skill levels for ship crews and armies; similar to the concept I read in the HOI4 dev diaries on army divisions: Green / Trained / Experienced / Veteran. For HOI4, it even mentioned the ability to spend time and resources to train green units up to the trained level. I feel this would add greater game depth as the true strength of enemy fleets and armies becomes harder to estimate. An enemy fleet stack estimated at 5K (based on ship #s, type, and tech) could be under or over estimated if the average fleet skill level is veteran or green. In addition, loosing experienced / veteran ships & armies becomes more painful as it takes far longer to recoup the lost experience levels than just building / recruiting more units. Players also face strategic decisions of either rushing green ship crews and armies into combat or allotting the energy credits and time for them to upgrade to at least the trained level before their first engagement. Decisions... decisions.

Regardless... I'll get hours & hours of enjoyment from Stellaris soon enough.

Edit: Replace term manpower with organic personnel... [/QUOTE]

To me it seems there is already soms sort of mechanism in place which contributes to this. remember the Blorg streams in which they were pretty excited about building a training arena for their 'owls'. Seems to me, this building would have no function, if it weren't connected to training your recruits to a higher and more powerful level. Curious to find out how it will be integrated in the final release.

What would be exciting to me is that certain races are more suited/stronger to act as ground forces, to have those in your empire would greatly ehance the political game play and create certain dilemma's when it comes to xenophile/ xenophobe.