gaerzi wrote:With automatic system (let's say juveniles have a chance of becoming adults, in the same way as refugees have a chance to assimilate, and populations have a chance of becoming rebels/joining back into the fold depending on their morale; but adults only generate juvenile population) you'd get to a point where eventually the population cap is reached, so no new juveniles are generated, and then the planet will inevitably become fully adult. Since they're sessile, this planet becomes unable of launching colony ships. Your gardener empire could get locked in and fully depend on foreign races for fueling further expansion.
It would be worse than that; adults produce science and coin, but no labor or food, so every planet would eventually become unproductive and starve.
The number of adults you have on a given planet determines your science output (and inversely, your labor output), so it has to be something the player can choose and control precisely; it takes multiple juveniles to make one adult, so you're reducing the population when you perform this action (slightly similar to sacrificing slaves), so it would not be appropriate for it to happen automatically. You aren't going to want to have that many adults on most of your planets, so I don't expect it to be too burdensome in terms of management. Obviously we'll test it to see if it plays well.
The alternative is to have the ratio controlled by the buildings you construct; so for example if you build two labs, then eventually an appropriate number of adults will appear. That doesn't allow the player to make immediate changes, and it's kind of passive and boring and doesn't give the player a sense of the underlying mechanic: maturation for the Gardeners isn't a natural process, it's an external and deliberate one. The adult collective is essentially a single organism, and it only adds nodes when it decides it needs more capacity.
akkamaddi wrote:A while back (over a year), one of you mentioned about a race that was the typical 4x game's "unfriendly", with minimal diplomacy and other races driven out of their system.
I'm guessing that the polymorphism within the Zubelengen, and that their description fragment in the current files indicating communication has failed, imply that the Zubelengen are the "driven exterminators" of SiS? (Tinkers would be the "assimilators". )
Yes, the Gardeners have a difficult time communicating with other species, since their internal communication is almost like telepathy, and they never developed formal language. The current idea for how this is represented is that communication with each alien species is an expensive tech that must be researched, and which can be boosted by obtaining live specimens to subsume (which of course is not likely to please the target race), and even then they may have only limited communications options. But while it may be more expedient in some cases for them to destroy a race rather than learn to communicate with them, the Gardeners are not exclusively hostile.
akkamaddi wrote:Arioch, I suggest you put a pin in that. When the game eventually fleshes out random events, and if they can be race-specific, then "A weird prion on Planet 123 affected part of the population's metabolism before a treatment could be found. One unit of population was forced into early maturation." would be an excellent event. Rare, obviously, but realistic for a society that undergoes metamorphosis.
I like your thinking, but in this case metamorphosis isn't really something that could happen accidentally; it takes preparation, group action and direction from the hive mind. Multiple juveniles have to join together into a sort of chrysalis, when then has to be attached by other workers to the "cloister" that is the adult collective.