Now that tiles are gone - can't we just move to Victoria style pops?

[shivan]

First of all, I love the new revamp. The new system with the more advanced economy is definitely a step up, but it has room for improvement.

The biggest problem right now is the way that pops work. Some people have suggested that instead of choosing one pop to grow (based on some alt-right logic that minorities will outbreed us all) then all pops should grow simultaneously and total growth is split between all pops as I believe it was in the old system.
The objection is that this creates the problem that if you have 10 pops on a plant you get no new pops for ages and then suddenly 10 pops.

This can be solved if we just move to pops with numeric styles. Instead of 1 pop representing 1 pop for 1 job. Then 1 full pop is, say, 1000 people. What currently provides 1 job now provides 1000 jobs and so on.
Total pop growth per planet would be calculated as:
base growth * modifiers * pop_weight

So if we pretend that base growth is 50 and we use 1000 pop size one example of could be.

Notice that we get a fractional number in the growth in the example, this could be solved if we moved to 10,000 per 1 current pops.

Besides from the obvious traits like rapid breeder and slow breeder and modifiers from buildings habitability should also play a role. Instead of modifying pop growth speed habitability should modify the weighting of how much of the total pop growth that species gets. At 0% habitality you get 0% of the growth. Such pop could exist there if forcefully relocated, but would migrate away over time if they had better alternatives. Also that way rapid breeder tundra species do not outbreed desert pops on a desert planet.
The current system is just untenable, you colonize a desert planet and through migration treaty or refugees you get tundra pops who decide to settle on that planet and breed like crazy even though they hate it. Causing ever-growing resource drain.

Output from jobs would then be the weight of the pops working that job times their modiers. If there would not be enough pops to fill a full then the final output would be weighted in that way. So if there were 900 pops then output would be 90% of normal output.

I think it would not only solve a lot of the wonkiness with the system because only one pop can grow at the time, but it would also improve immersion. Imagine all the possibilities it opens up.
Mandate: Create 10,000 new jobs.
Mandate: Create 5,000 new units of housing.
Upgrading buildings that produce more per filled job, but provides fewer jobs in total; pushing some pops out of a job.

 

[Objulen]

The biggest logistical hurdle would be how to manage species' output bonuses. They could be averaged out over the pops applied to a job, but it's an issue that authoritarian and Gestalt empires would want to address, assigning pops to their most efficient jobs.

 

[Linusz]

Why not use V2 handling of pops, like the title suggests? Worker jobs are RGOs and specialists factories and so on. Calculating the output for each group of individuals to account for modifiers is already done in the current system. So this shouldn't be a problem.

To be honest, looking at 10 different pop groups in the population tab of a planet for the first time in Le Guin reminded me a lot of V2. Additionally, we could get rid of the absolute pop numbers and go into digits. Does not seem too complicated for me.

 

[shivan]

The biggest logistical hurdle would be how to manage species' output bonuses. They could be averaged out over the pops applied to a job, but it's an issue that authoritarian and Gestalt empires would want to address, assigning pops to their most efficient jobs.

How would that be complicated? Just like this, no?

 

[Objulen]

Fractionalizing pops, essentially, would be doable. I haven't played V2, so I don't know if there's differences in pop outputs, but I think there would just need to be systems to aggregate pops who are more efficient at specific jobs to those jobs, since Authoritarian and Gestalts would do this.

There should also be job weights for pops based on their species traits, but fractional pops would make egalitarian empires more organic.

It's not about the math, just implementing it in a way that supports the varied play styles of Stellaris.

 

[Chthon]

Using that method also allows you to have a fractional worker in a spot producing reduced output that grows over time. This would encourage us to build jobs for growing pops, not just have a pop appear out of nowhere, and need to employ them suddenly.

 

[ZomgK3tchup]

I feel like Paradox went out of its way to avoid Victoria 2-style pops and "this game is a glorified spreadsheet" accusations.

Unfortunately, that meant a clunky pops menu and unintuitive features like "only one pop can grow at a time".

 

[Chthon]

I feel like Paradox went out of its way to avoid Victoria 2-style pops and "this game is a glorified spreadsheet" accusations.

Unfortunately, that meant a clunky pops menu and unintuitive features like "only one pop can grow at a time".

I recently had this driven home to me, when I didn't realize that colonies under 10 pops get a 25 point immigration bonus. I quickly built up 6 new colonies in my starting sector (it was a really nice sector for that) and my home system ended up getting those slow growing rat pops from the caravaneers. One of them started growing and didn't grow up for over 40 years. I forget exactly how long it took, but it grew at a rate of 0.20 a month. Instead everyone emmigrated to the new colonies, who instantly started growing their own rat pops at half speed, because I didn't know about the 50% population growth penalty that also happens.

In short, once it got past the colonial stage, that sector was a powerhouse, but I was way behind the curve for economy that game. A better system like this could have improved the situation greatly.

edit: 4 planets were 95% habitability for my race, 1 was 75%, and another was 80% habitability for some early refugees that came out of nowhere.

 

[M@ni@c]

I'd prefer the math of the game to be kept simple. That means for me I prefer discrete rather than fractional pops.

The pop growth formula is a separate issue that can be perfectly addressed without touching the concept of discrete pops.

 

[magickware99]

I'm not even sure why pop and pop growth should be considered one of the core aspects of the game-play at all. I think it really holds the game back.

 

[Incompetent]

IIRC, Victoria and Victoria 2 have a rather quirky pop system when it comes to how pops get jobs: each factory has a discrete number of slots, so the number of *pops* that can work at a given factory is fixed, rather than the number of people. Bigger pops are more productive than smaller pops, but it's not linear, so given the same number of people, a more diverse population can have much more potential output, but needs more factories to achieve this. So in the context of Stellaris, where job slots are very strictly limited, you probably don't want to literally copy the Victoria system.

I think 'one pop grows at a time' is fine, as long as you have a sufficiently robust algorithm for apportioning future growth among the different species. Mathematically, this is perfectly doable, even deterministically. For instance, the devs could start by looking at the algorithms used to apportion seats in parliaments with proportional representation. The numbers deciding which pop grows next might end up looking a little opaque to players, but a) the overall results will give sensible proportions (taking into account any species/planet-contingent modifiers you want) and b) not knowing which pop will grow next is still a lot less confusing than managing various fractional pops and their jobs.

I'm not even sure why pop and pop growth should be considered one of the core aspects of the game-play at all. I think it really holds the game back.

Population growth is a core aspect of 4X games in general, and how could it not be? You start small on a single planet, and grow into a galactic empire; there needs to be some process involved in getting from one to the other.

 

[Sergei Andropov]

Heh, my first thought when I saw the Pop system in 2.2 was, "Wow, I wasn't expecting Victoria 3 to be a Stellaris patch."

In Vicky 2, each Pop was a specific combination of ethnicity, religion, and occupation that lived in a certain province. For example, there might be an Orthodox Albanian farmer Pop living in Istanbul that had 200 members, and a Sunni Turk craftsmen pop in the same province with 14,000 thousand members, and a Shiite Tatar capitalist pop with two members, and so on. Pops could lose membership to other pops with the same religion and ethnicity, which is how people changed jobs. It was a pretty cool system.

The problem is that it lead to a huge amount of complexity that the UI just couldn't handle. The UI was great at presenting individual data points, but terrible at presenting overall statistics, and it was often very difficult to understand how all the moving parts of your empire fit together, or why the damn Albanian artisans still had poor living conditions no matter what you set the tariffs at.

 

[ZomgK3tchup]

Population growth is a core aspect of 4X games in general, and how could it not be? You start small on a single planet, and grow into a galactic empire; there needs to be some process involved in getting from one to the other.

Tbf, it's a space game, so it is a little jarring how much attention planets get compared to actual space.

And you don't really need to represent population in a 4X game. You just have to have something that catalyzes growth, which for a space game could be number of space stations or how many quadrillions of calculations per nanosecond your empire puts out or whatever.