Farming / Food Changes

[Chasm]

Cool, Gaiads, Gaiads EVERYWHERE...

[Arioch]

Technically, this is not 100% true. Right now, there's a class of population that are marked with the special "don't spawn in colony ships". This class includes Gaiads, Enfi, Threshers, and Scavengers.

That is essentially what I said in the post above the one you replied to.

I'm not sure if that's the best way of handling this case. I mean, from a world-building perspective, I think the reason you're getting Gremak, rather than Enfi, is that Gremak are more willing and able to serve as colonists, so it makes some sense that their population would be the one to contribute colonists, even though they're a minority. But on a pure scavenger world that somehow is functioning well enough to build colony ships, I imagine the scavenger population might well end up being used as colonists. Maybe we should have another optional boolean in the race definitions; something like "doesn't want spawn in colony ships, but can, if there's no better option"

I'm thinking that that "last resort colonist" boolean would be true for Scavengers, Algorians, Lummox, and Threshers. But false for races that are truly tied to planet, like Pell or Gaiads. It's all a little overcomplicated. But, not really hard to implement, and it would let people like Chasm, who want to make a mono-race galaxy using some unusual race, do so without fighting against the core game mechanics.

The point of marking some population as "Primitive" is because they don't have the technological capability to operate a colony ship or found a colony. Frankly, I don't think Primitive races should be able to run a colony at all; you shouldn't be allowed to move out the last high-tech population point, just as you can't abandon a colony by moving out population. You might let dolphins do jobs in your factories, but they're not qualified to run your factories.

If you want to populate the galaxy with Threshers, there's nothing preventing you from doing this: just send a normal colony ship and then move the Threshers there afterward.

The overcomplicated way of handling the colony ship issue would be to put multiple race-specific versions in the build menu, one for each eligible race on the planet. Really, the population in the ship should be subtracted from the planet's population; it's not a huge deal in the early game, but in the late game you can churn out colony ships pretty quickly and then just unload the free pop and scrap the ships. You could create colony ships empty and make the player load population; but this would cause obvious problems with new players sending empty ships and then wondering why they can't colonize.

[nweismuller]

The overcomplicated way of handling the colony ship issue would be to put multiple race-specific versions in the build menu, one for each eligible race on the planet. Really, the population in the ship should be subtracted from the planet's population; it's not a huge deal in the early game, but in the late game you can churn out colony ships pretty quickly and then just unload the free pop and scrap the ships. You could create colony ships empty and make the player load population; but this would cause obvious problems with new players sending empty ships and then wondering why they can't colonize.

I'm inclined to agree with Arioch here- build race-specific colony ships that cost existing population, thus making the population model make a bit more sense and allow finer control over colonisation.

[SilasOfBorg]

New players would probably need a one-time notification similiar to the trade pool notification which pops up on turn 1 and says something like:

"<your race> has a shiny new colony ship. Colony ships start empty so you can choose whom and when to send out into the great beyond. Time to load it up!"

After that it's up to the player.

I do think the pop mechanics get a *lot* more sensible if you can't essentially convert minerals to people.

[SirDamnALot]

"<your race> has a shiny new colony ship. Colony ships start empty so you can choose whom and when to send out into the great beyond. Time to load it up!"

I see a lot of D'oh! moments with empty colony ships in orbit of nice planets coming

[nweismuller]

"<your race> has a shiny new colony ship. Colony ships start empty so you can choose whom and when to send out into the great beyond. Time to load it up!"

I see a lot of D'oh! moments with empty colony ships in orbit of nice planets coming

I'd think it'd be less cumbersome to choose what species the ship is loaded with when construction commences and have it automatically withdrawn when construction completes, personally, and less prone to such facepalm moments.

[SilasOfBorg]

"<your race> has a shiny new colony ship. Colony ships start empty so you can choose whom and when to send out into the great beyond. Time to load it up!"

I see a lot of D'oh! moments with empty colony ships in orbit of nice planets coming

I'd think it'd be less cumbersome to choose what species the ship is loaded with when construction commences and have it automatically withdrawn when construction completes, personally, and less prone to such facepalm moments.

Yeah, I agree. It might introduce a few (more ) gameplay niggles that would have to coded around though:
* if pop is taken when the colony ship is complete, and your world is starving, what happens if there's less than 1 million people left of the target pop when the colony ship is done?
* if pop is taken when the colony ship is complete, what if you ship most of the pop offworld while you're building it and there's less than 1 million people left of the target pop when the colony ship is done?
* if pop is taken when the colony ship is started, and it puts you below maximum efficiency for farms/mines/etc, you potentially lose out on resource generation during colony ship construction.

You know what? I think the best solution is a combination of both:

1. select a target race when the colony ship is requested. Can do it like Moo where there's distinct colony ships available for each valid race on the planet, or via dropdown, or whatever GUI method seems most appropriate.
1a. allow the player to choose 'none' / 'empty'. I would definitely want to build empty ships on occasion on a factory world and send them to a heavily populated world to pick up their cargo.
2. when the colony ship is done, 1 million pop of that target race (or none) is auto-loaded into the colony ship.
2a. if there isn't enough pop for whatever reason (bombing, starvation, migration, etc), *then* we have a warning - every time - notifiying the player that things didn't go quite as planned and they have an empty colony ship in orbit. It can still be loaded up manually, with a different pop, or elsewhere, or scrapped, or whatever the player wishes to do with it.

Sound reasonable?

[mharmless]

I think the best way to handle this is just to build colony ships as empty by default. When the ship actually finishes building, have it load one unit of pop, of the same race it would have selected to contain under the old system, automatically. If it is unable to do so for any reason, such as lack of valid races or insufficient population, toss a notification on the right hand side about a lack of population to fill the ship. Do not have this auto-load count against the manual load/unload limits within a turn.

Presto, newbies don't get burned, production doesn't generate population out of thin air, and edge cases pop the same kind of notifications about situations to address that many other systems already do. If the 'wrong' population was loaded, the player can disembark them, load the correct colonists, and move on.

[Unbroken]

I think the best way to handle this is just to build colony ships as empty by default. When the ship actually finishes building, have it load one unit of pop, of the same race it would have selected to contain under the old system, automatically. If it is unable to do so for any reason, such as lack of valid races or insufficient population, toss a notification on the right hand side about a lack of population to fill the ship. Do not have this auto-load count against the manual load/unload limits within a turn.

Pretty much this.

The early game is over way too soon right now, partially because colony ships generate pop units from thin air. As a result there's no real disadvantage against rampant colonization, short of food shortages.

[sven]

I think the best way to handle this is just to build colony ships as empty by default. When the ship actually finishes building, have it load one unit of pop, of the same race it would have selected to contain under the old system, automatically. If it is unable to do so for any reason, such as lack of valid races or insufficient population, toss a notification on the right hand side about a lack of population to fill the ship. Do not have this auto-load count against the manual load/unload limits within a turn.

Pretty much this.

The early game is over way too soon right now, partially because colony ships generate pop units from thin air. As a result there's no real disadvantage against rampant colonization, short of food shortages.

Arioch has finally talked me into making this change. Should be going live in the next patch.

One interesting issue with this new colony ship behavior: if you have a planet with nothing but a primitive race (say, lummox), and you build a colony ship, the colony ship will be empty. But there's nothing stopping you from loading a unit of lummox onto the ship, and then colonizing a planet with them. thats... kinda strange, but technically 'working as intended', unless or until i can think of a better way of handling it.

Another messy edge case is how the behavior works when you're building a colony base. Like colony ships, you now effectively get a 'free' transport action that moves one unit worth of your preferred colonist species to the new base. However, if you don't actually have a full unit of pop available to load onto the ship, then the colony base is still created, but it starts with a fractional population (<1) drawn from the source planet. This means that if you buy a bunch of colony bases in the late game using coins, you may end up with a lot of very low (<1) population worlds. I think this is a fine behavior. The other reasonable behavior, I think, would be to implement a range or warnings / production delay logic around the cases where a colony base can't be completed for lack of population. That's harder to code up, and in some ways, less realistic. If you want to spread a tiny population around the planets in a star system, you can, but it's a waste of resources unless you have a few transports full of warm bodies en-route to populate all that newly purchased real estate.

[Chasm]

A simple popup *empty colony ship, load it* would be preferred to an auto load feature. Or an option to turn OFF auto load.

[sven]

A simple popup *empty colony ship, load it* would be preferred to an auto load feature. Or an option to turn OFF auto load.

Why? If you want a different species on the ship, you can always just unload the auto-loaded colonists.

[Chasm]

Fractional population rounds down (below 250 k, if I remember right) if population drops to below 1, and on a mixed world, I might not want that. Especially if I'm producing colony ships over a scavenger world. You definitely don't want to give certain races any room to grow...

[Arioch]

Fractional population rounds down (below 250 k, if I remember right) if population drops to below 1, and on a mixed world, I might not want that. Especially if I'm producing colony ships over a scavenger world. You definitely don't want to give certain races any room to grow...

I don't follow your point here. Colony Ships will always be auto-loaded with the most number eligible colonists, which will never be below 1.

[Chasm]

So if I have a colony with humans 1.1 mil, and scavengers 5 mil, and build a colony ship, it wont reduce the humans to .1 pop (clearing them due to population rounding)? or will I have an empty hull colony ship in orbit? If its the second result I would be fine with it. The 1st result would effectively lose me population even if I decided to ship the empty hull elsewhere after unloading it. Or is the minimum to pull population off a world 2 mil (ie at least 1 million need to be left on the world for population to be pulled from it?)