Planet advantages/disadvantages

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Sento
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Planet advantages/disadvantages

#1 Post by Sento »

I wonder what planet shall i colonize in my system the inferno the toxic, the barren or none of it?

What benefit have i colonizing the inferno as example?
I searched for a description in the game in the forum but found nothing.
It would be nice if you write a list, i can see if i click on a planet, of what advantages and disadvantages the planet has.

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eleazar
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#2 Post by eleazar »

In the current version, terran is the best. All you need to consider is the max possible population.

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utilae
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#3 Post by utilae »

It should be dependant on your race. If your race likes infernos, then infernos it is.

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Geoff the Medio
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#4 Post by Geoff the Medio »

eleazar wrote:In the current version, terran is the best. All you need to consider is the max possible population.
That's not entirely true... some techs giving bonuses to mining, industry, etc. are more effective on certain planet types, as outlined in their descriptions.

I think there are also some quasi-hard-coded bonuses depending on planet type and size.

There are no races in the game yet, so there's no dependence on usefullness of different planet types on race.

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#5 Post by Sento »

i tried to colonize a inferno and all colonists that were send there seemed to die.
Please make ingame a note that theese planetes cannot be kolonised by my race and make it possibly to uncolonize planets if all people die...

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eleazar
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#6 Post by eleazar »

Sento wrote:i tried to colonize a inferno and all colonists that were send there seemed to die.
Please make ingame a note that theese planetes cannot be kolonised by my race and make it possibly to uncolonize planets if all people die...
Inferno worlds aren't necessarily fatal, it depends on your surplus of food. This will me made more obvious when the enhancements to the GUI underway are completed.

I have seen a colony "die" that is, have a population of 0 for many many turns, but it was never made available for re-colonization.

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#7 Post by Geoff the Medio »

eleazar wrote:I have seen a colony "die" that is, have a population of 0 for many many turns, but it was never made available for re-colonization.
That's because the current population indicator only shows integers. You probably had a population of 0.06 or so, which would show up as 0, but not be close enough to zero to be considered dead, so not recolonizable.

tzlaine justified this by saying that the player shouldn't be worried about such small numbers, but in practice I think it's necessary to show, for the above reason. The redone sidepanel will show such small numbers with appropriate SI prefixes (used as postfixed, eg. 103m = 0.103) so that the number of significant figures shown is small, though the dynamic range of possible values is larger.

There is presently no way to abandon a nearly-dead colony, or to transfer population by migration, or drop more population onto an existing colony with a colony ship, though likely these will be added.

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#8 Post by noelte »

.. or maybe a descent below 1 should be taken as 0, meaning that population has died?
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#9 Post by Geoff the Medio »

noelte wrote:.. or maybe a descent below 1 should be taken as 0, meaning that population has died?
Well, that's a bit harsh, and not very forward-thinking.

It's harsh because it's very easy to drop below 1 if you have any initial food shortage on the planet. If all colonies died after every dropping below 1, you'd probly end up with a lot of newly-created colonies dieing, which would be annoying. Also, a less-than-1 but not 0 colony is still quite viable. With adequate food it will regrow and surpass population 1 fairly quickly, as long as it's not less than 0.05 or so population.

It's not forward-thinking because in future, we probably won't have all planets start with population 1. Colony ships will likely have varying capacities... and it might be a viable strategy to drop much less than 1 population unit on a planet, and then bring in more by migration. The units of population are quite arbitrary... so the fact that 1 looks significant as a number doesn't mean it is. 0.01 is as reasonable a "minimum viable colony population" as 1.00 is.

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#10 Post by noelte »

Wow, very long reply. ;)

But, my thinking is that there should be some minimal pop. It's quite odd if you fly around and drop one person per planet, and say after it the rest arrives per migration. Colony module should come with 1 pop. To prevent starving right away, you usually would feed starving world first, if all starve those which starve to death first, so your starving new colonies will survive by let older colonies starve a little.

At the moment the algo which distribute food simply doesn't recognize the difference between starving and starving to death, which should be changed. (I hope i remember what i did those times ago and noone has changed it meanwhile).

BTW, i hopefully will get internet access from home after waitng for two year, if so i will reclaim my part at fo. :)
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eleazar
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#11 Post by eleazar »

Geoff the Medio wrote:The units of population are quite arbitrary... so the fact that 1 looks significant as a number doesn't mean it is. 0.01 is as reasonable a "minimum viable colony population" as 1.00 is.
No. The fact that "1" "looks significant" means it is a more reasonable "minimum viable colony population" than a number that doesn't look significant. After it's people that will play this game— beings who generally tend to believe "1" is more significant that "0.01". A sensible game caters to the way people naturally think, whenever possible.

Dropping off custom fractions of a population point to colonize seems micromanagey to me. A better development of colonization would be to eventually create ships that can carry more than one population point.

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#12 Post by Geoff the Medio »

eleazar wrote:No. The fact that "1" "looks significant" means it is a more reasonable "minimum viable colony population" than a number that doesn't look significant.
Regardless of how it looks, less than 1 population is still a viable colony population in practice now, and will be even more so once migration is involved. In the latter case, a population of (effectively) 0 would still be a viable population, assuming a few numerically insignificant individuals are there waving the flag. Millions of immigrants could arrive the next turn and start working, without need to formally create a new colony.

The fact that 1 looks significant is nice, but it doesn't necessarily mean that 1 has to be the minimum allowed population; the value 1 could have other significance, like being the minimum population required for infrastructure growth or to be able to have emigration from the planet. (Or could be meaningless... life would go one, figurative and literally).
Dropping off custom fractions of a population point to colonize seems micromanagey to me. A better development of colonization would be to eventually create ships that can carry more than one population point.
How is multiples of 1 any less micromanagy than fractions of 1?

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utilae
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#13 Post by utilae »

Having citizens migrate using their own ships would probably be more expensive than if the government built the colony ships for them.

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eleazar
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#14 Post by eleazar »

Geoff the Medio wrote:
eleazar wrote:No. The fact that "1" "looks significant" means it is a more reasonable "minimum viable colony population" than a number that doesn't look significant.
Regardless of how it looks, less than 1 population is still a viable colony population in practice now, and will be even more so once migration is involved.
V.3 reqs wrote:Normally, there is no explicit migration between the populations of planets.
Geoff the Medio wrote:In the latter case, a population of (effectively) 0 would still be a viable population, assuming a few numerically insignificant individuals are there waving the flag.
Practically speaking, at some point the population will be too small to maintain itself as a civilized part of a space-faring empire. Game-play IMHO requires that bad management eventually destroy a colony. What number is better than less than 1 for colony death? At the very least you should have an alternative proposal, with reasons why something else is better. Perhaps the emergent interactions of the game will provide a reason why minimum population should be a fraction. But until that is proven to be the case, the simplest and most obvious cut-off should be used.
Geoff the Medio wrote:
eleazar wrote:Dropping off custom fractions of a population point to colonize seems micromanagey to me. A better development of colonization would be to eventually create ships that can carry more than one population point.
How is multiples of 1 any less micromanagy than fractions of 1?
Because whole numbers are obvious, intuitive, discreet units of population.

• Using whole units of pop: the basic colony ship present you with one option: colonize or not. A super-colony ship with a pop of 3 could be deployed in 3 ways (1 big, 1 med & 1 small, or 3 small).
• In your version, the population of a 1-pop colony ship could be spread through a system in a huge number of different fractional configurations.

I believe the philosophy of this game is to prevent the player with significant choices. Managing the exact head-count of a new colony doesn't strike me as such.

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#15 Post by Geoff the Medio »

eleazar wrote:
V.3 reqs wrote:Normally, there is no explicit migration between the populations of planets.
That was just copied from the v0.2 design, which was before my time. I'm not sure if it was meant to imply no migration ever, but there's been a good amount of discussion on the subjuct and nobody's ever mentioned before that it was ruled out. I've emailed to get clarification...
Practically speaking, at some point the population will be too small to maintain itself as a civilized part of a space-faring empire. Game-play IMHO requires that bad management eventually destroy a colony. What number is better than less than 1 for colony death? At the very least you should have an alternative proposal, with reasons why something else is better. Perhaps the emergent interactions of the game will provide a reason why minimum population should be a fraction. But until that is proven to be the case, the simplest and most obvious cut-off should be used.
Well, I don't have an exact proposed number (other than 0.01, which was arbitrary), because it's rather hard to come up with such a number with reasons other than "because it is significant-looking" right now. I suspect that 1 is probably too much, because the population numbers are so granular... ie. a unit of 1 population is relatively a lot on one planet compared to the maximum possible population...

A space opera might have very large planets with a trillion people on them (Trantor, Coruscant, etc.). If these are the top of the population scale, or 100 FreeOrion population units, then 1 unit of population is 10 billion people. That's a bit more than what I'd consider the minimum necessary to significantly contribute to a galactic empire. 0.01 would be 100 million people... 0.001 would be 10 million. I'd suspect 10000 would be a "realistic" minimum viable colony population, capable of growing to a reasonable size in a few hundred years by human-like natural means. If factory cloning or significantly different repopulation mechanisms are available to other species, then even fewer might be quite viable.

Obviously this is a game and not supposed to be especially realistic, but a minimum viable population of 1/30th of the max possible population on a quite fertile planet at the start of the game seems like a bit too high a threshold to me, both realistically and for gameplay purposes.

Then again, the Civ games do fine with a settler being 1 unit of population compared to max city populations of 6 or 8 and actual city population of 1 or 2 at the start of the game...
Geoff the Medio wrote:How is multiples of 1 any less micromanagy than fractions of 1?
Because whole numbers are obvious, intuitive, discreet units of population.
Ok, but does population need to be treated and displayed as civ-like discrete units? Internally population is stored as a floating point number that's more precise than one person out of the population of the earth. To the player, it could be an amorphous mass of productivity, infinitely divisible. There would be plenty of fixed sizes contraining the usefullness of such infinite divisibility (like predefined sizes of colony ship), but migration and growth or population loss don't need any such restrictions...
• In your version, the population of a 1-pop colony ship could be spread through a system in a huge number of different fractional configurations.
Being able to have viable populations less than 1 doesn't meant that colony ships become able to colonize a whole system on their own. Even if colony ships have enough population to make many viable colonies, the ship itself would have only one set of the necessary components to start up a colony. You'd need multiple ships to make multiple colonies (or some other way to create new colonies without ships, most likely only in systems where you already have a colony).
I believe the philosophy of this game is to prevent the player with significant choices. Managing the exact head-count of a new colony doesn't strike me as such.
I'm not proposing keeping track of individuals amongst populations of billions, but perhaps we should rescale the population numbers? The displayed and player-visible population could be always 10 or 100 times the population meter value of a planet. So my 0.01 threshold would become a threshold of 1. A planet could have up to 1000 or 10000 population (though in practice would have 300 or 3000 respectively at the start of the game....)

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