War Rationing

[HFY]

IRL, production and logistics for Food are critical for war.

In Stellaris, neither armies nor ships use the stuff.

It would be pretty easy to have armies use it, since they have a pop attached (and can thus key off that species for whether they want food or minerals or what).

Not sure how to do ships, but I bet someone has an idea.

===

Once armies in the field and ships far from port have a food upkeep, then we can start adding policies about how to deal with food shortages at home -- perhaps a Situation, perhaps a repeating event.

Maybe you can buy food off the market a few times, or use a custom solution for your Ethos:

- Militarists & Spiritualists might have an Ascetic Virtues option to support the war -- just plain eat less, no happiness penalty while at war.
- Pacifists & Xenophiles might create extra food ("Exotic War Gardens") by growing unusual foods, and the peace dividend would be increased agricultural production as the lessons learned make their way into official use.
- Xenophobes & Authoritarians might deprive some pops in specific, or even purge some pops into Soylent Blorgburgers to support their war effort.
- Materialists & Egalitarians might algorithmically & artificially optimize their diets, substituting a smidgen of minerals & exo-gas for higher food yields for all. Side effects are temporary, consult your Gene Therapist if dizziness persists for more than 2 rotations.

Thoughts?

 

[CaesarVincens]

I'm always a fan of adding more interesting situations to the game.

I think the main issue is the lack of logistics, as in there already exist situations for resource shortages, and usually I'm so flush with resources after the first couple decades that it'd be odd to have a "wartime" shortage which wasn't already covered by the existing shortage mechanics.

However, it does raise an interesting concept, perhaps it'd be possible to script a situation for a fleet far from supply lines.

 

[Dementor4]

The lack of supply lines in the game at any level of simulation has always annoyed me a bit.

 

[DanielPrates]

IRL, production and logistics for Food are critical for war.

In Stellaris, neither armies nor ships use the stuff.

It would be pretty easy to have armies use it, since they have a pop attached (and can thus key off that species for whether they want food or minerals or what).

Not sure how to do ships, but I bet someone has an idea.

===

Once armies in the field and ships far from port have a food upkeep, then we can start adding policies about how to deal with food shortages at home -- perhaps a Situation, perhaps a repeating event.

Maybe you can buy food off the market a few times, or use a custom solution for your Ethos:

- Militarists & Spiritualists might have an Ascetic Virtues option to support the war -- just plain eat less, no happiness penalty while at war.
- Pacifists & Xenophiles might create extra food ("Exotic War Gardens") by growing unusual foods, and the peace dividend would be increased agricultural production as the lessons learned make their way into official use.
- Xenophobes & Authoritarians might deprive some pops in specific, or even purge some pops into Soylent Blorgburgers to support their war effort.
- Materialists & Egalitarians might algorithmically & artificially optimize their diets, substituting a smidgen of minerals & exo-gas for higher food yields for all. Side effects are temporary, consult your Gene Therapist if dizziness persists for more than 2 rotations.

Thoughts?

Also it would be another way to wage strategic warfare. It makes me mad that fleets can go anywhere, oblivious to supply and/or range. Most wars end up being economy wars (i.e., deprive the enemy etc) and it is about time we start having some significant elements to that effect.

This will probably require new mechanicals for supply source, supply path etc... so at the end, we'll probably never see anything like this.

 

[SirBlackAxe]

For ships you could just use ratios: take all your species with military service rights, and sum up their base resource upkeep times number of pops to get the ratio of pop:energy:minerals:food. Then just multiply that by whichever conversion factor you're using for fleet size to pops.

That also makes the military service species right a little more interesting, in that if you have a multispecies empire you can use it to influence which resources you're paying ship upkeep in by preventing certain species from serving.

You could represent supply lines by giving non-reinforcement fleets outside of allied space pseudo trade routes to their home base, and inflicting penalties if it's blocked, but I'm not sure how computationally expensive trade routes (with no graphics) are. If it's not a lag issue, that gives you the stretegic angle of capturing the correct systems to encircle a doomstack and cut off it's supply lines in order to debuff it and make it more manageable (although it might be hard to teach the AI how do that).

I'd like if the food shortage thing could give you international aid opportunity situations.

 

[InvisibleBison]

I don't think it makes sense to implement rationing in Stellaris. The militaries in the game are much, much smaller relative to the size of the populations than was the case during various historical conflicts where rationing occurred.

 

[DreadLindwyrm]

IRL, production and logistics for Food are critical for war.

In Stellaris, neither armies nor ships use the stuff.

It would be pretty easy to have armies use it, since they have a pop attached (and can thus key off that species for whether they want food or minerals or what).

Not sure how to do ships, but I bet someone has an idea.

===

Once armies in the field and ships far from port have a food upkeep, then we can start adding policies about how to deal with food shortages at home -- perhaps a Situation, perhaps a repeating event.

Maybe you can buy food off the market a few times, or use a custom solution for your Ethos:

- Militarists & Spiritualists might have an Ascetic Virtues option to support the war -- just plain eat less, no happiness penalty while at war.
- Pacifists & Xenophiles might create extra food ("Exotic War Gardens") by growing unusual foods, and the peace dividend would be increased agricultural production as the lessons learned make their way into official use.
- Xenophobes & Authoritarians might deprive some pops in specific, or even purge some pops into Soylent Blorgburgers to support their war effort.
- Materialists & Egalitarians might algorithmically & artificially optimize their diets, substituting a smidgen of minerals & exo-gas for higher food yields for all. Side effects are temporary, consult your Gene Therapist if dizziness persists for more than 2 rotations.

Thoughts?

Is a unit of food (theoretically what an entire pop eats in one month) really a valid amount for an army or a ship to be consuming? If not a full unit of food, what proportion of a unit of food would be appropriate?

A pop is (generally) estimated in the millions to hundreds of millions of human equivalents (except during colonisation, but that's a different issue - I see the one colony ship we send as being a stream of colonists over the initial growth of the colony, with that initial colony ship laying down the fundamental foundations of the settlement and getting the frontier happy specialists in place), and surely even a Juggernaut or Battleship isn't going to come even close to that, or even an appreciable fraction of a pop in numbers.

 

[HFY]

Is a unit of food (theoretically what an entire pop eats in one month) really a valid amount for an army or a ship to be consuming? If not a full unit of food, what proportion of a unit of food would be appropriate?

Good question. Since I haven't specified, you tell me -- what is a reasonable army food upkeep?


Regarding pop numbers, keep in mind that each pop can only support 1 army being recruited from it. Whatever numbers are assigned to pops, each army is a theoretical maximum of extracted individuals. If you have 28 pops, you can recruit up to 28 armies from those pops, full stop.

 

[-Marauder-]

"War in stellaris is tedious, let's make that worse!".

Aside from that. This doesn't seem like it would add anything beyond complexity and another upkeep for the sake of complexity and another upkeep.

 

[DreadLindwyrm]

Good question. Since I haven't specified, you tell me -- what is a reasonable army food upkeep?


Regarding pop numbers, keep in mind that each pop can only support 1 army being recruited from it. Whatever numbers are assigned to pops, each army is a theoretical maximum of extracted individuals. If you have 28 pops, you can recruit up to 28 armies from those pops, full stop.

I'm not sure. I suspect any "sensible" value related to the size of an army as compared to a pop would make it trivial as upkeep, and more busywork than anything. I've never actually looked at how granular the food counter is (or energy/alloys for the more exotic armies); I also don't know how many armies "pro" players keep around in game for their invasions. I suspect 1/100 is too small to be easily counted by the game, but 1/10 is too much to be reasonable for the comparative numbers of an army unit compared to a pop, even accounting for military tending to over stock and then have to dump almost expired stores.

To be fair, I only asked to try to move the conversation along generally and see if anyone had any good ideas, rather than hoping you'd worked out the scheme ahead of time and just decided not to include it in your post.

 

[tanny]

Don’t we already have enough war issues? Militarized economy is pretty much the meta right now.

 

[Xaelyn]

I don't think food is really a relevant critical resource or logistical issue for a space-faring civilization; Even for a modern human civilization, producing and supplying the food for a military requires orders of magnitude less effort than than producing and supplying their equipment and ordinance. The more advanced a military becomes, the smaller and smaller the food portion of the budget becomes, because food requirements will always be fairly linear with size whilst equipment becomes more and more expensive. A ship that consumes 1 energy credit worth of upkeep every month should be costing somewhere on the order of 0.0000001 food/month, which is not a relevant amount to track.

As for general food shortages and rationing, these happen in earth wars for two reasons; Being cut off from food supplies, whether through losing access to colonies and overseas trade or having your food producing areas occupied or otherwise rendered unusable by the enemy, and drafting of farm workers into the military or the factories.

Being cut off from trade can't really happen until they implement actual on map trade routes for external trades, same for being cut off from your colonies, though losing access to your food production by having the colonies themselves occupied is already possible.

Drafting farmers into the military doesn't seem like a relevant consideration for a futuristic spacefaring civilization, manpower actually in the military surely pales in comparison to the amount needed in the factories supplying it, as it already does for modern human militarys, and drafting your farmers into the factories is already something you can do by closing farming jobs and opening up more alloy jobs, so if you want to starve your empire in a futile attempt to marginally increase alloy production you can already do that.

 

[bughunt3r]

One word: Replicators.

"Tea. Earl Grey. Hot."

 

[Pancakelord]

Rationing, I'm not sure about. It implies logistics mechanics, and honestly that doesn't make much sense to me with how the game works, currently.

• Edit: there is one area where a distinct policy might make sense - occupation support.
• When you occupy a world, and you are not out to genocide the population, you should have to upkeep those pops (not their jobs too - as they'll produce nothing) base upkeep.
• A policy setting how you approach occupation (influencing crime, stability and pop upkeep, wartime refugee events and the risk of the occupied planet rebelling[possibly a good target for espionage]) could be a good application for rationing - as having to feed every world you occupied from an AI federation might be quite expensive, but things will be easier for you if you can...

But just wanted to highlight one possible implication of adding a mineral/food/energy 'crew' upkeep for ships. If you want it to be consistent, this would also mean adding it to other orbital infrastructure to represent some kind of crew; starbases, mining & research stations... possibly megastructures.

• Though as others have mentioned this would likely be drowned in fractions of a single food or mineral unit (and weird logic based on empire makeup).
• it would make more sense to take (e.g.) 1 mineral, 1 energy & 1 food (or a 2:1:0 / 3:0:0 ratio for some empires) and make 5-15 'ship supplies' - and use that as your ship upkeep resource.
  • Though people basically already do this via low-level monthly resource orders with the market, so not sure it adds much.

It would be easy enough to do this for ships, too. Add a new core component "crew complement" with a triggered resource upkeep block for food - or the above unified resource.

• Could have different types to represent biological, lithoid, cyborg, synth crews and so on.

Whilst I don't think this adds much on its own, ship crew statistics could be a gateway drug into

1. moving armies over to warships (maybe into a special "I"(invasion) slot on corvette/destroyer segments), or
2. Implementing an additional 'green' health bar for all ships, representing the ship's crew count.
   1. New type of missile/strike craft "boarding pods" could then damage this bar directly... provided shields are down.
   2. Having a larger crew module costs more upkeep (as your crew stat is bigger) but makes you less vulnerable to boarding weapons.

However, Food / mineral and energy upkeep on armies (as they currently work) is trivial to do, and I fully support it (their current mineral construction costs ought to become alloy costs, maybe halved of their current mineral amount).

• Right now armies also restore max health in about 3 seconds. I'd also go as far as to say they ought to have significantly reduced regen speed and have increased food(or equiv) upkeep to replenish health.

 

[Dementor4]

The lack of supply lines in the game at any level of simulation has always annoyed me a bit.

To expand on my thinking here: I would be happy with a upkeep modifier on both naval fleets and invasion armies based on the number and status of systems between that fleet and either a shipyard or an anchorage you control (which would be used as an abstraction for a storage and resupply depot) Each system you own and control between the fleet and its shipyard/anchorage adds maybe 1% percent to the upkeep cost, systems you control but don't own add maybe 2%. Systems controlled by neither you or an enemy add 5%, systems controlled by an enemy add 10%. Hyperlanes reduce these costs to zero as long as an enemy doesn't control the space. Further modifiers might account for the presence of space fauna or pirates and such.

So you could defeat an enemy by getting behind his doomstack and taking control of the systems between his territory and the fleet. Take just three of those systems and you would impose a significant 30% penalty to his upkeep costs, using a much smaller and more nimble force.

 

[-Marauder-]

To expand on my thinking here: I would be happy with a upkeep modifier on both naval fleets and invasion armies based on the number and status of systems between that fleet and either a shipyard or an anchorage you control (which would be used as an abstraction for a storage and resupply depot) Each system you own and control between the fleet and its shipyard/anchorage adds maybe 1% percent to the upkeep cost, systems you control but don't own add maybe 2%. Systems controlled by neither you or an enemy add 5%, systems controlled by an enemy add 10%. Hyperlanes reduce these costs to zero as long as an enemy doesn't control the space. Further modifiers might account for the presence of space fauna or pirates and such.

So you could defeat an enemy by getting behind his doomstack and taking control of the systems between his territory and the fleet. Take just three of those systems and you would impose a significant 30% penalty to his upkeep costs, using a much smaller and more nimble force.

Once again, this is a fix for a non existing problem. And one that would make war even more tedious, irritating and annoying than it already is.

 

[3ishop]

To expand on my thinking here: I would be happy with a upkeep modifier on both naval fleets and invasion armies based on the number and status of systems between that fleet and either a shipyard or an anchorage you control (which would be used as an abstraction for a storage and resupply depot) Each system you own and control between the fleet and its shipyard/anchorage adds maybe 1% percent to the upkeep cost, systems you control but don't own add maybe 2%. Systems controlled by neither you or an enemy add 5%, systems controlled by an enemy add 10%. Hyperlanes reduce these costs to zero as long as an enemy doesn't control the space. Further modifiers might account for the presence of space fauna or pirates and such.

So you could defeat an enemy by getting behind his doomstack and taking control of the systems between his territory and the fleet. Take just three of those systems and you would impose a significant 30% penalty to his upkeep costs, using a much smaller and more nimble force.

Considering we can feed entire worlds on the other side of the galaxy with no issue...that seems more of where a logistics system should apply than to the ships.

And for most armies, as by default organics are attached to a pop and the pops continue to eat food even with it having an army, that would surely cover the food cost. Also am I the only one who tends to move away from these armies? I'd feel a system that adds more downsides to them would push that even more.

 

[Dementor4]

Once again, this is a fix for a non existing problem. And one that would make war even more tedious, irritating and annoying than it already is.

It would add a layer of tactical depth, simulate a crucial element of real warfare, and create a viable counterplay to the doomstack (which is, in fact, an existing problem).

 

[Druitt]

In Endless Space 2, you can actually see little (non-selectable) ships flying across star lanes carrying migrating populations, supplies, etc. And they can literally be destroyed by hostile fleets, pirates, etc. So it has puzzled me that in Stellaris there is a piracy effect on trade flowing across star lanes, but not really migration or supplies.

I hear the argument that it could make war tedious. And I imagine that the AI would be brutally efficient at sending partisans to cut off your doomstack's supply lines. So I'm a bit torn, but it really feels like starlanes are major things: they're enhanced by technology you have to push to get, and eventually superseded in critical situations by even higher-level technology, though with potential downsides to those technologies. So they're important, except that populations, trade goods (including raw materials), and military supplies can move vast distances and (mostly) totally ignore star lanes. (I say "mostly" to account for closed borders and movement to unexplored systems.)

And realistic extended war does depend on securing and supporting supply lines.

On the other hand, the military supply mechanic is somewhat abstracted into fleet health: you do have to stop and repair, even though that often involves just running to a nearby starbase you just conquered. Similarly, upgrading your fleets. So in some sense the repair and upgrading of fleets sort of includes the kind of foraging and other "can't push continuously and with no breaks" that supply lines also include.

 

[3ishop]

It would add a layer of tactical depth, simulate a crucial element of real warfare, and create a viable counterplay to the doomstack (which is, in fact, an existing problem).

Not really. My doomstack smashes the enemy, pushing their supply lines further back and stripping them of production, this opens up more sources for supplies for my fleet while stripping it from the enemy and a fleet small enough to have low enough demand to try and launch long range will be vulnerable to starbases and quick production fleets. It also over looks advances in our own tech phase for the real war.