The solution to the late game lack of pops,and making pops more important! [LP]

[TSBasilisk]

You can't have 1 pop unit still be working the same sized area for 400 years. So to do so from the start achieves almost nothing but creates problems: You will be having explosive growth and lack colonies and jobs. And you're taking out the sense of progression that you would have otherwise. The system needs to be flipped on it's head, because pop growth is flipped on its head.

If I were to take this a step further, I'd have pop needs be based on job outputs, so that a pop working on an inneficient job would be angry. but that's a whole other discussion.

You can mod district job modifiers, but they apply instantly, either across the empire or a single planet. And of course you can mod buildings seperately by level.

The difference between this and Victoria is that the automation of the industries already happened. The pops already have industrial tractors, boring machines, and more to minimize worker count. Replacing the key remaining workers with Robots is the last step in fully automating the industries.

As for explosive growth, you can still keep carrying capacity and double the growth cost of pops to reflect they're rarer now.

Your suggestion isn't so much fixing the issue of pop growth slowdown as it is shoving it further down the line.

 

[GloatingSwine]

I think OP has mostly fixated on the idea of representing increasing pop productivity in one specific way and is focusing on it for aesthetic reasons, whether it's actually the most playable way to do that or not. (It's not)

 

[Kaoru Sen'nin]

Works just fine by disabling the pop growth limiter.

 

[Matthias.]

I just wanted to talk about an interesting mechanic to reduce performance issues and allow the abolishment of the artificial pop growth limitations at the moment, which in my view really destroys the game. I read about this in the forum a few weeks ago.

The Idea is to consolidate pops on big planets into super pops which represent 2/3 or more pops based on a level of capital buildings.
Pop growth on more populated planets will not create new pops, but will turn 1 normal pop in to 1 "2x pop.
This should massively reduce the number of pops in the late game only at the cost of some generalization.
I think the negative impact on gameplay would be much lower than the current growth limitations have. A positive side effect would be the reduction of micromanagement.

I wrote months ago about my solution to the problem, which would be to consolidate pops. I think this is an easy way which conserves the original game feeling.

 

[gamerk2]

Works just fine by disabling the pop growth limiter.

Which then has performance impacts. And the AI can't manage that many pops anyway.

Which highlights a second problem: We need a system where Jobs scale with the pop growth rate. All this systems we're discussing break if you disable the growth limits and go back to pre-3.0 growth rates.

This is why I've long held the economic system needs a dedicated patch to address. And yes, I think we need a 2.2 style re-work here.

 

[MatthewP]

I think the idea is great. Early game pop growth is the way to grow. Upgrade costs can be scaled so it's a bad idea to focus on them (though as usual probably viable against the AI) if you have expansion and pop growth as an alternative. Late game when growth slows down and you have more resources, the upgrades become really meaningful investments that also feel good because they free you from the "I don't have enough pops to fill stuff up" drag.

That said, it would be yet another major rework, with all the expectations of broken AI and rounds of half fixes that entails. Not meaning this as a slight on the devs, but it's not only what's happened with every previous rework and it's probably inevitable with such a big structural change to a game of this complexity. I think the product would be better...eventually. But it means a lot of time spent that could be used to build on the game we have, imperfect as it is.

 

[rubert]

I already mentioned in another thread that I would prefer if the planets itself could gain (and lose) "effiency" somehow (eg. being in a stable, peaceful location without wars, away from the borders etc). It has always felt bit silly that in couple decades the player can colonize a new planet, build it full of alloy foundries, labs or whatever, resettle pops and it will be as effective as a century old first colony or the homeworld.

 

[sillyrobot]

Works just fine by disabling the pop growth limiter.

Well, "Fine" as in once I hit about 10K pops the slowdown becomes very noticeable and as I approach 20K pops it becomes unbearable. There's a reason they tried to reign in pops, even if I think the solution chosen was sub-optimal and riddled with its own problems.

 

[Pancakelord]

I already mentioned in another thread that I would prefer if the planets itself could gain (and lose) "effiency" somehow (eg. being in a stable, peaceful location without wars, away from the borders etc). It has always felt bit silly that in couple decades the player can colonize a new planet, build it full of alloy foundries, labs or whatever, resettle pops and it will be as effective as a century old first colony or the homeworld.

You could do a time check. Add a bunch of debuffs "New colony" (+build time -output, whatever you like) and decrease them by 5% every 6 months. But this is only for new colonies.

• So if you have +100% build time, +100% build cost, +50% pop upkeep -50% output, this would decay to 0% in 20 years, with upkeep and output having decayed within 10.

You could do calculations based on proximity to the border, but that might get CPU intensive? Not sure. Safer, computationally, might be to look at it from a sector POV - like add an implicit bonus based on sector infrastructure - provided sectors get fleshed out more..

• For example all colonies outside of the core sector have increased build cost/time etc - unless their respective sector capital world, has a (Tier 2) capital. Which means if you can quickly build up a sector capital, it'll save you a lot of time, and - as the name implies - the sector capital would actually be a hub for that sector.
  • I personally think that trade routes ought to be reworked to flow from planet > sector capital > empire capital (and the other way too), rather than just from random starbases to the capital, to further force infrastructure but that would require both a trade and sector rework... We have more Chance of seeing EU5 released before that lol.