What's in a Pop? Pointless food and no overcrowding.

[Silverfish42]

So - full disclosure, this is a repost from the suggestions forums that got zero interest, but then drew some attention when I inquired about it on reddit. The bit of agreement there made me think maybe I'm not totally nuts, and feel like trying again here to get some discussion going. Onward!
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I would really like some sort of overhaul to how pops interact with planets, tiles, and food down the road. I understand that pops don't represent any particular number of beings, but right now I just don't feel like I'm controlling worlds with billions of sentients living on them. The odd lack of urban and technological backgrounds for planet tiles doesn't help any.

I've seen some discussion for allowing worlds to be built up to more than 25 tiles, with various levels of construction representing everything from underground complexes to orbital habitats (and those are awesome ideas), but I feel like I would like it to go one step further and divorce the number of pops on a world from the tile system.

Pops should be more than just another resource to move around onto the right tiles (unless you're xenophobic slavers, I guess?), worlds should be able to build up surplus population, beyond which can provide you useful work. This would make food much more important for one thing, and provide an impetus for allowing it to be moved between worlds somehow. Different species traits would also provide different bonuses or maluses for pops living on overcrowded worlds.

It just feels really strange that the tiles fill up and it's like "That's it! No more babies or immigration on this planet, even if it is literally the nicest place to live in the galaxy and we have infinite resources!"

I'd imagine this would be good fit for systems interaction with much more complex factions and internal politics as well. I've seen at least one mod checking pop happiness and ethos for a simulation of voting on things like wars and policy changes, and that's awesome.

What do you lot think?

 

[Lothmar]

It just feels really strange that the tiles fill up and it's like "That's it! No more babies or immigration on this planet, even if it is literally the nicest place to live in the galaxy and we have infinite resources!"

Well no more then what is needed to replace aging/dying population etc.
x babies per Y corpses

 

[arithon]

Agree with OP..

There needs to be more building options, surplus food should be available to sell or distribute throughout your civ, and excess population should become a problem or necessitate a pop to move to another planet. There needs to be someway to expand the tile numbers as well.

 

[schedim]

What is the average man, but a machine to turn perfectly good food into waste ...


I completely agree with you, and I think there is great potential to get some more life into the Pops. I can see no technical reason stopping the future of having Pop to actually stack (with the help of tech and such). Perhaps even de-spiece the Hive-city-stacks and just have the species show up as percentages in a tooltip.

While waiting for that (or something) I'm writing pop centred flavour mini event. Just to remind the player of their subjects...

 

[kreissig]

I have to also agree with the OP. I would personally rather have portraits representing the different species on a planet, followed by just straight-forward population numbers. Then have the various tiles function as build slots for infrastructure improvements/levels.

1. The population levels could be broken into thresholds for the additions they give.
2. The buildings should be varied and more numerous, and have associated +'s and -'s to them.

That would seem more intuitive in my mind. I would feel more connected to that world.

 

[Nick Giordano]

I always thought pops shouldnt be on/off. Your growth percentage should literally be how many people are on that tile.

In vanilla a pop at its 50% growth stage is not "enabled". It does not collect the resources of that tile. If a pop is supposed to be 1 million, 100 million, or 1 billion, what are the people doing between 1% and 99% growth stage?

Assuming 1 pop = 100 million people, my suggestion would make it so that a 50% growth stage pop is 50 million people. They would collect resources of the tile, albeit only 50% of it.

It's a system found in Victoria 2, a factory or province (tile) can have 1 person in it and it make 0.1 of a product. Have 1000 people in the factory and it'll make 100 product (before modifiers kick in).

 

[Silverfish42]

I definitely would at least like some sort of overflow so that pops can keep growing on a world. Maybe a sidebar that shows the excess pops, from where they can migrate to other worlds and contribute to total happiness or unhappiness on a planet. Some of the folks in the reddit conversation have suggested doing away with the tiles somehow, but I doubt we'll see a change that drastic. As well as some art and maybe building types that contribute to feeling like a planet grows as more people come to live there. The growth rate of pops is kind of weird with the abstraction - a planet can fill up in a couple of decades, or less - what the hell does that mean? Billions of people exploding from nowhere to fill all available space? Just the bare few thousands to run the infrastructure you want to build? It's just so weird there aren't... you know, cities and whatnot. It seems like even on your homeworld, you are just building these isolated power plants and research centers in the wilderness or something.

 

[schedim]

Yepp, I would actually not mind slower pop growth, but instead having the pop start produce earlier. And have no hard cap on max size (but soft caps like food etc). the production should be mapped on a monod curve (or something similar) where after a certain point the production per pop unit begins to drop (Parkinson's law etc).

 

[Vishaing]

It's pretty ridiculous that the "Industrial Wasteland" and "Sprawling Slums" tile blockers only ever exist on Homeworlds of newly arisen Space Empires and never ever show up on any other planets and only exist to provide an early game Resource Sink. These should be something that can arise dynamically based on the situation.

Sprawling Slums, instead of blocking Pops from living on that tile they should Lock Pops to those tiles and just prevent them from providing any resources or even draining resources instead. Pops should have an Absolute Size and a Percentage Size, with them both having no upper limit. If the Percentage Size is over 100%, or 50% if the Pop is Unemployed, there is an increasing chance of a Slum Forming. However having a Food Surplus increases the Absolute Size that 100% Corresponds to.

Industrial Wasteland should be a possible result of Mining Networks and Power Plants. Basically, let us upgrade both above the level our tech allows, but allow these too-far-upgraded tiles to devolve into Industrial Wasteland which prevents them from being upgraded further until the tile is cleared, and provide a major Happiness Penalty to the tile itself and tiles nearby.

 

[Treybor]

I would honestly just love if they'd used Vicky 2 pops instead of the pops we have now, I loved the Vicky 2 pops

The current pops are bland in comparison

 

[Tyrberg]

Slower popgrowth would be good.

And presumably nearly full homepages, with industrial buildings like the once the early spacefaring civilizations got

 

[Anthropoid]

Sims in Stellaris!

Seriously though, while I agree with you in principle, I think what you are talking about is a gigantic overhaul that would more-or-less involve redesign major parts of the game. If you can pull it off and make it a fun mod, I salute you!

But it ain't gonna come from Paradox I do not think. There are too many other aspects of the design that hinge on the current tile system for them to just redesign it for a DLC. If your mod is good enough though, maybe they'll get inspired by it for Stellaris II.

 

[schedim]

Seriously though, while I agree with you in principle, I think what you are talking about is a gigantic overhaul that would more-or-less involve redesign major parts of the game. If you can pull it off and make it a fun mod, I salute you!.

I'm not sure it is that big overhaul, most of the basics are there already, and something cold be gleaned from the Vic3 project...

It depends more on what the Dev team want do with Stellaris. They have already shown that they like the first X more than any other Dev team of a 4X I have ever seen..

Beharps the second X get as much love too ...

 

[grommile]

I would honestly just love if they'd used Vicky 2 pops instead of the pops we have now, I loved the Vicky 2 pops

You can't have V2 pops without making the whole game be about the V2 pops.

The lead designer clearly did not want to write V2 In Space.

 

[UrineArtist]

Some interesting ideas on reworking pops, I certainly think they need reworked and food needs to become a more useful resource, however I don't have a problem with planet populations reaching a plateau, I'd expect space mushrooms would have figured out birth control before warp drive.

 

[Ingros]

Hm... the current system with the tile blockers already simulate some kind of technologic improvement... but still there is something missing

I also would like to see some kind of happiness reduction if the world gets full... so poeple want to move out these planets much more often and make room for new pops

And i agree that also growing pops should use the Ressources and buildings directly with the respektive %

 

[PirateJack]

I was having a kickabout in the moddable files last night and discovered a couple of lines of code in the 00_static_modifiers file that may interest you.

# This is the penalty for each pop above the limit a planet can support.
overcrowding = {
    pop_happiness = -0.10
    #pop_fertility = -0.375
}

So there is code in there to handle overpopulation. I just think it's not enabled right now, or perhaps it's unfinished or bugged.

 

[schedim]

I'm fiddling around with pops right now, and there are a lot of stuff you can do already. I guess it is the mid-game deficiency that has been mentioned elsewhere.

 

[Silmarion]

Just like last time thos was brought up, I have yet to see anyone explain

1. How overcrowding would be actually fun instead of tedious. Simply adding more clicks or resource sinks does not engaging gameplay make.

2. How forced pressure to expand gels with certain playstyles. If I want to be a bunch of Xenophobic Pacifist, pointedly ignoring the rest of the galaxy, or even just want to play tall, ideally those should be just as valid a choice as mindless blobbing.

3. How, given the declining birthrates among merely post industrial societies in the real world, overpopulation would even be an issue for a FTL capable race.

 

[schedim]

Just like last time thos was brought up, I have yet to see anyone explain

1. How overcrowding would be actually fun instead of tedious. Simply adding more clicks or resource sinks does not engaging gameplay make.

2. How forced pressure to expand gels with certain playstyles. If I want to be a bunch of Xenophobic Pacifist, pointedly ignoring the rest of the galaxy, or even just want to play tall, ideally those should be just as valid a choice as mindless blobbing.

3. How, given the declining birthrates among merely post industrial societies in the real world, overpopulation would even be an issue for a FTL capable race.

Have you played Vic? If so, you have the answer to the first two questions (IMO).

The third one is just an opinion made from a one point sample survey....