Population Control

[slayernz]

I agree - having a transport ship that can transport x number of population units at once. They don't get consumed when they arrive at a destination planet, but rather, can be re-used again! Even better, they can also haul CP around too - imagine it as being a load of construction materials carted from a high-producing planet to a newly formed planet!

Ooo .. then you whack a cat logo on it, and we got ourselves a delivery service!!!

[chak]

Refugees ought to spawn with escorts. A great way to build.up.the early fleet and succesful rescue missions giving extra templar defenders would be awesome early on.

Given that population is required to man the factories, this would take population control from an insoluble epidemic to a highly coveted resource demanding tactical consideration. Especially if reproduction takes a fixed interval of AE.

I like colony modules being dismantled for CP as well as carrying CP cargo. Cargo, passenger capacity and weapons should be selected between at craft design.

Human military in boarding pods, ship crews and planetary defense could require and be 1 population. Deployment of craft for extended periods of time can reduce morale by one to two points (for the soldiers themselves and then their families).

On that note morale ought to equal population with 10 minimum and going up when population goes over that but always functioning as a percentile rounded off to the nearest increment. This would keep the math for morale effect on economy the same but create a larger buffer for high pop planets and likewise being more expensive to restore.

Morale might be commoditized into cargo packages as well. Reflecting communication resources. Mail ships delivering and picking up morale from soldiers in the middle of a battle would create yet another tactical-economic mission to manage. How long is the battle going to be? Whats the upkeep on the mail ship and its escort versus the cost of morale itself? Military morale shouldn't be recoverable with festivals although their second point for families ought to be.

These things combined would give incentive to providing steel song with high quality planets. It would also create a nice slew of functions within which to give the clan some kind of military related clan bonus (deployment morale lasts longer and/or morale CAN be recovered with a unique festival).

Reproduction should be able to be turned off but if kept off for too long morale should suffer and require a festival. Each population should contribute a fixed amount to this upkeep so that low population planets accumulate this kind of negative morale lezs frequently than high pop planets.

Given all this, morale itself ought to have a statistical breakdown viewable by planet to observe where morale is at and have give numbers to do math on for estimating what keeping morale up will require.

[fallen]

@chak - thanks for the great feedback. Welcome to the forum and hope you'll stick around.

[abysmal]

Well, I don't think most of the population are people who are reproducing. I mean, unless we have vats in Star Traders, most people can't age to 18 in less than 2 weeks, and TB did say something about other people joining in the quadrant. I think that something that could be considered is that for every 2 quality you go over your Maximum Morale goes down. I mean, I have a colony ready to revolt because the 8 quality planet has 19 population, and all the quality improvements including the 1+ Hab unit that puts me over quality. I mean, I should easily lose morale over population, but if people keep swarming the really bad planets, I feel more like I'm being penalized for a random event.

On a side note; Hab Unit only planets are really really bad on the economy.

[khamya9]

What is the actual growth mechanic? Is it a per planet check or a per faction or what? Is there any way to influence where people go currently (I saw the posts about future plans for treaties)?

[fallen]

khamya9 - we do continue to have treaties to influence population movement on the docket for future releases.

[Chak]

Honestly, I like the game. On medium/hard it's an easy time waster but it doesn't really offer a challenge now that I understand the game. I try to play on impossible but it makes no sense beyond that I know I just get less money and try to do the same stuff with fewer mistakes. Seems to me that jacking up the economy and making population unmanageable is an arbitrarily poor way of increasing "difficulty" to be honest. It's not the same game or challenging, just frustratingly uncontrollable. That said, I've beat the tutorial on impossible.

I post here because the lack of population control seems to make the choice of having it be a factor in difficulty suspect. Even festivals don't seem to promise to be worth much unless we're talking human sacrifice. From what I've read so far, I'm guessing that would be against certain ethics.

I would rather see economy remain the same and have AI be more skilled/aggressive on higher difficulties because then I could learn the game and that a victory would be real. Winning the tutorial on impossible was not satisfying because of this. I feel like I'm running on a tread mill that just got sped up. It is a kind of accomplishment but since I cannot know the factors involved I didn't feel like I made an actual intellectual choice that won. I just did the same things I did on easier more precisely and slowly and for less reward.

As such I feel like I'm playing with a handicap rather than an actual increase in difficulty. The population issue is similar to feeling like a handicap. With mechanisms for population control I would feel like I was making tactical decisions but without that it's just frustrating because if I get unlucky I have to start the map over rather than adjust strategy to compensate because there are no strategic factors to play at.

So I just threw out a few ideas. It's a great game. It could be a lot a better. I don't pay for tablet games very often. Thus far I have paid for 3 in all. I will also leave you a review.

[AA]

The AI is more aggressive

[fallen]

@chak - thanks for the feedback about the game's difficulty scale. We are always working to do better.

We really appreciate you taking the time to leave a review on the game!

[Chak]

Nov 28, 2014 12:04:51 GMT -5 AA said:

The AI is more aggressive

Which is what I want without the impossible economy and population. As it is, with a feasable economy, the AI is a joke. I want to have a difficult tactical experience without feeling crippled to meet it.

Right now either I'm overwhelmed and underpowered or overpowered against an idiot AI that wastes most of its moves. Hard and crazy seem to be nice mediums depending on the map but the AI just makes me smh and thus gives unsatisfying "victory."

[Cory Trese]

I'd love to hear specific feedback about the AI, and how you would like to see it enhanced.

[khamy9]

Dec 1, 2014 13:54:22 GMT -5 Cory Trese said:

I'd love to hear specific feedback about the AI, and how you would like to see it enhanced.

I like how the different xenos are more or less aggressive. But I can't see any difference in their fleet composition or ship stats. One says "favors fast ships" but I didn't see anything different from any other xeno faction.

The ai gives too much priority on firing at the nearest p!ayer ship, instead of checking for vulnerable/nearly dead ones that are fleeing or one/two squares back. 

The ai seems to behave in monolithic ways. Meaning completely at war sending the whole fleet at you in one go, or completely at peace and not doing much. As technology improves it seems to leave obsolete ships in service.

On big maps with blocking terrain the ai tends to stall out expansion. If there are many worlds nearby it colonizes far faster than the human, but then it sits there and builds colony ships but has no where to send them for hundreds of turns.

Why not gather obsolete ships and send them out as exploratory or strike forces that are not flagged to start a war? This clears out the old ships so their fleet is more likely to contain new designs, gives the ai some extra expansion without it being a total zerg fest, and gives the player something to worry about, but doesn't bog the game down into an endless siege/total war scenario.

For example, in my current game, krangg have been alone on the far west of the degla 128x64 map (hard difficulty) sitting at 11 worlds through three active cycles. From previous experience, I know I can ignore them for another two hundred turns before they get to 12 worlds. Maybe even longer. There's no more worlds close enough to them so unless I pull their fleet at me and show them a world, they'll just send their ships in circles around their existing planets. Most of their ships are level 1, even though they have the tech to build level 3s. So when I do move on them, their initialmdefence fleet will be grossly underpowered. If I move fast enough, I can defeat their armada before they build a significant number of level 3 ships.

If, instead, they gathered up 7 or 8 obsolete ships and sent them wandering together in a cluster, then I'd get a surprise that's not game ending, but definitely exciting.they would then have "room" to build more new ships so when we do finally fight their defenses are stronger. And they might "see" a new world to colonize rather than sitting put.


But, if they are flagged like the current monolithic ai, as soon as I defend myself, it would start an endless war with them where they keep sending every newly built shipmat me until either I or they are wiped out. Which is no fun. They need some kind of raid mentality where those ships only aggro each other, not the whole faction.

Xenos that see no player to fight might send off one (or two, in a big enough map lat in the game) such raids with each active cycle. If they were sent to map locations and parked, it makes exploring hazardous since you might find the lurking ships. And it makes active cycles interesting because you don't know if something is coming your way or not.