After reading a lot of thoughts about current POP growth mechanics and its weirdness and its flaws, I thought about the one change to POP that would not require a total rework, but I think could help. But before that let’s talk about problems, at least as I (and other people at this forums) saw them.
Firstly, most of the issues are about multi-species empires. When we are talking about strictly single-species empire most of the issues are non-present. But that’s not the majority of the empires present in the game, nor (that’s my own speculation here) they are a majority of the player empires either. Conquer all you can, but usually player conquers planets, systems AND POPs and it’s usually overall beneficial to keep the new POPs rather than try to kill or displace them.
The problems start to arise when we have a lot of various species in the empire. First issue comes from the fact that game chooses which POP to grown in a very arbitrary way. Well, there is a weight system that determines these things, but maybe it’s a balance issue, maybe it’s a bug, but currently game behaves in a very erratic fashion in regards to choosing which POP to grow, seemingly ignoring habitability. This makes zero sense and actually could hurt an empire due to POP deciding to grow in a very ill-suited environment, 20% habitability for example. Funny enough that’s not that big of a deal, since this whole thing could be fixed with a few tweaks to weight system. And there are already a few mods that fix the weights so the aforementioned case is alleviated to a degree, as far as I could tell.
The much bigger issue is the fact there is only one slot for growth at any planet, plus one for robotic pops and one for declining pop. So, at any given time, only a single POP could be growing, being assembled or be in decline. Overall, this system is a nice middle ground between over complexity and simplicity. But this system works very well only when it’s about a single-species empire. Your POPs are growing, there are factors to this growth, empire-wide, planetary and species-specific – all is well. You have a lot of colonies that create immigration pull – fine, this pull basically takes some of the growth in the core worlds are redistributes it. This system is quite neat, makes sense and, in general, working nicely. Same with robots – usually they are an axillary population of sorts. Assembly speed for standard empire is not great, 50 months for a single POP, but that’s fine. Once a robot POP is finished, the next begin its production, nothing too complex is needed here, at least when we are talking about default robots and default empires.
This whole system starts to creak, however, the second we add a new species to our empire. Because any given planet have only one slot for growing, so the game have to choose which new POP to grow. And for the time being this POP would be the only one growing at this planet. [Side note – right now vanilla game tries to create this absurd artificial equilibrium of species on every planet. So it’s choosing POP to grow with regards to this species representation in empire’s demographics and tries to ‘fix’ it. This is insanity by itself, I get that devs wanted to ‘liven’ up the empires with various species. But vanilla balance leads to some truly bizarre configurations, like founding species having LESS POP in 100 years of game time compared to the start of the game, for reference https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/foru...es-decided-to-commit-auto-extinction.1137665/].
So, say a planet chose to grow a new species POP – and it does so with the practically the same speed as any other species! This looks exceptionally good when this new species grows at the same speed as a species that makes up 98% of the empire. And again, I kinda get what devs are going for – if we consider things ‘realistically’, for new species to have even a noticeable representation, they would have either a immense immigration push (maybe they are refugees, fleeing from homeworld for any reason) or they have to be basically rabbits – which can’t happen due to the lack of a trait ‘rabbit’ (+500% growth speed, -80% efficiency in every job). But that’s a lame reason to have artificially inflated growth rate for minority species. This might slow growth for any ‘underrepresented’ species in the empire to negligible values when compared to the ‘main’ one – but why on earth or any other planet species with a population of 10 billion should be growing at the same speed as a specie with 1 million?
This whole thing can’t work nicely, as the system exists right now, of course. Say, we have one founding specie and one new, minor one. And say we have this ‘new’ system for growth, so now this new specie’s growth rate is adjusted according to ‘more reasonable’ factors. Now its rate of growth is way less compared to our founding species, few times less in fact. But we still have single slot for growing, so this new pop would basically prevent any new POPs from growing!
This whole thing is stemming from one basic concept – right now any POP have a single binary status. I’ll call them active and passive. Passive is POP basic status – he is here, alive, well and functioning, have strata and all that. He is active when POP in the process of growing or declining.
So here is my suggestion - toss this whole binary story with POP status and instead have every pop to be eligible for growth and decline all the time. Right now while the POP is growing he have this progression from 0 to 100 – just leave it as is, but let’s call it ‘POP health’. So as soon as a new POP is born via natural growth or immigration-induced one – he starts at this 0 health. Then he grows, depending on various factors, until he reaches 100. At which point this POP is ‘done’ and a new one of the same species could be born. The key feature is that any POP should have this ‘health’ – representing the ‘fullnes’ of a single POP. A POP is an abstract for game design purposes an any case, but my idea is to change POP from binary ‘he is-he isn’t’ to more linear ‘form small to big’. This ‘health’ would affect this POP work efficiency, naturally, in the same linear fashion – 10% ‘healthy’ POP would provide only 10% efficiency.
One could argue that this system would be too much complexity for the sake of complexity. I think that in the current state of the POP growth mechanics multi-species empires are suffering from this ‘POP growth slot’ system too much. And proposed change would be able to fix it, and add a new set of mechanics for POP interactions, like how an orbital bombardment would sheer this ‘health’ for any POP, or how a POP could go into steady decline instead of, again, binary ‘POP is stable as rock-POP is declining’.
As for the performance – I honestly don’t think it would strain the game much, since every single POP in the game already have a set of specific feature (most notably their ethics, faction etc), so it’s not like game already doesn’t keep track of a certain set of parameters for every POP in the galaxy. The constant change in this ‘POP health’ is also not that much of an issue, since it wouldn’t be changing every month for every POP under normal circumstances. Plus we retain key features of the POP mechanics as a hole – individual POP species traits, ethics, strata and such. Demographics interface would have to be changed, naturally, but that’s small thing compared to the whole thing.
I’m sure this idea is not a new one. But I think it would go along very well with the new planetary economics. And, devs showed in 2.2 that they are willing to make some very big changes to the core game mechanics – thing that I was not aware of. I was not a fan of old tile system, but I was sure that it was here to stay. And to my delight it was changed into something much better. So here is hoping that POP growth mechanics could undergo some nice changes too.
Or maybe my idea is terrible and I’m completely missing the point, that’s always an option. Curious to hear what others might think about it.
Firstly, most of the issues are about multi-species empires. When we are talking about strictly single-species empire most of the issues are non-present. But that’s not the majority of the empires present in the game, nor (that’s my own speculation here) they are a majority of the player empires either. Conquer all you can, but usually player conquers planets, systems AND POPs and it’s usually overall beneficial to keep the new POPs rather than try to kill or displace them.
The problems start to arise when we have a lot of various species in the empire. First issue comes from the fact that game chooses which POP to grown in a very arbitrary way. Well, there is a weight system that determines these things, but maybe it’s a balance issue, maybe it’s a bug, but currently game behaves in a very erratic fashion in regards to choosing which POP to grow, seemingly ignoring habitability. This makes zero sense and actually could hurt an empire due to POP deciding to grow in a very ill-suited environment, 20% habitability for example. Funny enough that’s not that big of a deal, since this whole thing could be fixed with a few tweaks to weight system. And there are already a few mods that fix the weights so the aforementioned case is alleviated to a degree, as far as I could tell.
The much bigger issue is the fact there is only one slot for growth at any planet, plus one for robotic pops and one for declining pop. So, at any given time, only a single POP could be growing, being assembled or be in decline. Overall, this system is a nice middle ground between over complexity and simplicity. But this system works very well only when it’s about a single-species empire. Your POPs are growing, there are factors to this growth, empire-wide, planetary and species-specific – all is well. You have a lot of colonies that create immigration pull – fine, this pull basically takes some of the growth in the core worlds are redistributes it. This system is quite neat, makes sense and, in general, working nicely. Same with robots – usually they are an axillary population of sorts. Assembly speed for standard empire is not great, 50 months for a single POP, but that’s fine. Once a robot POP is finished, the next begin its production, nothing too complex is needed here, at least when we are talking about default robots and default empires.
This whole system starts to creak, however, the second we add a new species to our empire. Because any given planet have only one slot for growing, so the game have to choose which new POP to grow. And for the time being this POP would be the only one growing at this planet. [Side note – right now vanilla game tries to create this absurd artificial equilibrium of species on every planet. So it’s choosing POP to grow with regards to this species representation in empire’s demographics and tries to ‘fix’ it. This is insanity by itself, I get that devs wanted to ‘liven’ up the empires with various species. But vanilla balance leads to some truly bizarre configurations, like founding species having LESS POP in 100 years of game time compared to the start of the game, for reference https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/foru...es-decided-to-commit-auto-extinction.1137665/].
So, say a planet chose to grow a new species POP – and it does so with the practically the same speed as any other species! This looks exceptionally good when this new species grows at the same speed as a species that makes up 98% of the empire. And again, I kinda get what devs are going for – if we consider things ‘realistically’, for new species to have even a noticeable representation, they would have either a immense immigration push (maybe they are refugees, fleeing from homeworld for any reason) or they have to be basically rabbits – which can’t happen due to the lack of a trait ‘rabbit’ (+500% growth speed, -80% efficiency in every job). But that’s a lame reason to have artificially inflated growth rate for minority species. This might slow growth for any ‘underrepresented’ species in the empire to negligible values when compared to the ‘main’ one – but why on earth or any other planet species with a population of 10 billion should be growing at the same speed as a specie with 1 million?
This whole thing can’t work nicely, as the system exists right now, of course. Say, we have one founding specie and one new, minor one. And say we have this ‘new’ system for growth, so now this new specie’s growth rate is adjusted according to ‘more reasonable’ factors. Now its rate of growth is way less compared to our founding species, few times less in fact. But we still have single slot for growing, so this new pop would basically prevent any new POPs from growing!
This whole thing is stemming from one basic concept – right now any POP have a single binary status. I’ll call them active and passive. Passive is POP basic status – he is here, alive, well and functioning, have strata and all that. He is active when POP in the process of growing or declining.
So here is my suggestion - toss this whole binary story with POP status and instead have every pop to be eligible for growth and decline all the time. Right now while the POP is growing he have this progression from 0 to 100 – just leave it as is, but let’s call it ‘POP health’. So as soon as a new POP is born via natural growth or immigration-induced one – he starts at this 0 health. Then he grows, depending on various factors, until he reaches 100. At which point this POP is ‘done’ and a new one of the same species could be born. The key feature is that any POP should have this ‘health’ – representing the ‘fullnes’ of a single POP. A POP is an abstract for game design purposes an any case, but my idea is to change POP from binary ‘he is-he isn’t’ to more linear ‘form small to big’. This ‘health’ would affect this POP work efficiency, naturally, in the same linear fashion – 10% ‘healthy’ POP would provide only 10% efficiency.
One could argue that this system would be too much complexity for the sake of complexity. I think that in the current state of the POP growth mechanics multi-species empires are suffering from this ‘POP growth slot’ system too much. And proposed change would be able to fix it, and add a new set of mechanics for POP interactions, like how an orbital bombardment would sheer this ‘health’ for any POP, or how a POP could go into steady decline instead of, again, binary ‘POP is stable as rock-POP is declining’.
As for the performance – I honestly don’t think it would strain the game much, since every single POP in the game already have a set of specific feature (most notably their ethics, faction etc), so it’s not like game already doesn’t keep track of a certain set of parameters for every POP in the galaxy. The constant change in this ‘POP health’ is also not that much of an issue, since it wouldn’t be changing every month for every POP under normal circumstances. Plus we retain key features of the POP mechanics as a hole – individual POP species traits, ethics, strata and such. Demographics interface would have to be changed, naturally, but that’s small thing compared to the whole thing.
I’m sure this idea is not a new one. But I think it would go along very well with the new planetary economics. And, devs showed in 2.2 that they are willing to make some very big changes to the core game mechanics – thing that I was not aware of. I was not a fan of old tile system, but I was sure that it was here to stay. And to my delight it was changed into something much better. So here is hoping that POP growth mechanics could undergo some nice changes too.
Or maybe my idea is terrible and I’m completely missing the point, that’s always an option. Curious to hear what others might think about it.
