Auto Migration?

[Ashbery76]

The design in SIS is great because it does not suffer from much tedium.The only busy work is fiddling with pops movements.Some sort option for planets to auto migrate would help solve that issue.

[zolobolo]

I belive this was disccussed at one point: If I recall correctly the reason for this not being an optin was to no autoamte the game for the player

I agree that it is quite a considerable amount of busy work especially considering how well the UI is designed for other features and ship designs, buildings work

To simplify I sugges you download the pop MGMT mod: it will help in this task massively as you can sort by planet type and distributing the pops becomes much much simpler

I would love to see this mod integrated with the game completely as it is really essential

[Ashbery76]

I have it but it just not fun doing it.That is the reason it should have controls.

[Arioch]

It takes two clicks to move one unit of population from the planet info screen (shift-click on the pop icon, then click on the destination in the Planetary Report), and one extra click for each additional unit. Not sure how to make that much simpler without having the AI do it for you, in which case, I don't see the point. You don't have to micromanage your population in order to win.

A MOO2-like full-screen colony spreadsheet would be nice in order to assess what needs to be moved where, but I find that mouse hovering a pop over each of the planets in the list to see if it will provide a cap increase works well enough for my needs.

[sven]

I have it but it just not fun doing it.

My own feeling about pop movement is that it's an important and fun part of the game in the early going, but, can get a bit tedious in the late game. Personally, once the game has past a certain point, I tend to stop aggressively optimizing pop placements, and just focus on fleet construction and tactical battles. And as Arioch says, you don't need to keep optimizing pop throughout the game to win, so, this sortof works.

That said, I do sometimes think about the SoTS "migration" technologies, which were late-game techs that, when researched, caused certain races to automatically migrate to take advantage of open habitat space in your empire, without any need for action from the player. From a game design perspective, the important thing about a SoTS-style migration tech is that it doesn't just do population movement for you, it actually changes the core rules of the game so that manual pop movement is only rarely helpful.

I think there's room for late-game micro-reducing techs in a well balanced 4X. And SoTS-style migration is one I've thought about adding to SiS. As with everything though, I think getting the details right so that it really played well would be tricky. (You'd probably need new UI elements to control which races had which kinds of migration rights, and you might well need other kinds of new UI designs to give player sufficient feedback on what was going on.)

[zolobolo]

Havent played MOO originals but that tech sounds perfect: when researhced, each pop the player has access to will autoamtically spam a NEW single unit of pop on each of player controlled worlds where this action woudl increase overall pop limit Was this how it worked?

If so that would fit prefectly as it effectively eliminates the need to micro in hte late game while still causing diversity on the planet.

The reason I can think why this mmight be bad for the player is when a new pp is spawned on a newly created colony and the new pop has low moral from the start. But evne then the power ration is at worst 1:1 so should no no autoamtic rebellion correct?

If so, then the newly created pops could get their moral based out for at elast a while or a new +100 moral added to them for like 10 turns for them having found their perfect homes and the state providing them with all necessities

[Ashbery76]

Sounds a good solution.

[zolobolo]

(You'd probably need new UI elements to control which races had which kinds of migration rights, and you might well need other kinds of new UI designs to give player sufficient feedback on what was going on.)

If the tech would provide auto-spam instead of actual migration, there would be no need for addtional Ui fucntions or
Moral buff to newly crated pop (if needed) cna be displayed in the usual moral breakdown
Notification: to perfectly round up the fucntion it would be beneficial to have status con on the right hand snd summarizing what pops were created on which planets as part of the new social housing programm

Optionally: Adding a one-time coin cost of each pop sent ot migrate would furhter reduce the incentive to micro manage this in the early and mid game and provide contrast to the late game tech which really rewrites the rule and makes manual migration rarely worht it evne if the player has hundred planets. It would also make sense to make this decision less straight-forward as it is quite simple at this time. This makes it easier for the AI to manage of course and it seems very good in spreading the pops around - adding a cost to migration would mess with this AI logic of course which is suboptimal

From a game deisgn persepctive the manual migration mechanic seems good as it provides immersion into the civilization the player is controlling subtly turning player attention to their planet pop MGMT and the variosus races/their needs within. Finding a suitable world and seeing how much oveall capacity will icnrease is a nice feedback and seeing the pops actually traverse the distance in transports that hte player has produced previously makes these two aspect interlock perfectly.

The pop UI mod helps in reducing the time to find suitable planets massively as we cna sort by planet type and pops cna be spread accoridngly per type. It also reduces the time to identify the distribution of pops across planets and finding pockets of pops that are suitable to be transfered (the default list of overall pop does not provide either info). E.g.: When in war with faction X, their pops are not suitable for migration due to low morale but with the mod GUI we cna quickyl see which planets with high pop are actualyl not suitable right away due to the high amount of this rebellious pop.
Plus the mod UI alos help identifying planets with tanks on them which agai nsave loads of times during prep for invasions

[bjg]

... I do sometimes think about the SoTS "migration" technologies, which were late-game techs that, when researched, caused certain races to automatically migrate to take advantage of open habitat space in your empire, without any need for action from the player. From a game design perspective, the important thing about a SoTS-style migration tech is that it doesn't just do population movement for you, it actually changes the core rules of the game so that manual pop movement is only rarely helpful.

The technology researched by the empire, but helping the player (and not necessary the empire) is a strange concept. At least it needs to contain some additional improvements (not using transports to move, increase the effective capacities, etc.) Very hard to to right, will be hated (by some) if not perfect.

[zolobolo]

Indeed such a tech should not rely on transports from the pool to move around pops as that can wreck the economy in an insance and the player would not be happ abouth it

Hence it would problably wokr better if the new pops are spammed from thin air if you like: no transport required, or pops symphoned off from vlauable production planets. Just upside no downsides

[PrivateHudson]

That gonna be powerful tech! Think of all those (otherwise not terribly useful) Wrems on (otherwise not terribly useful) iceballs and barrens.

[zolobolo]

That gonna be powerful tech! Think of all those (otherwise not terribly useful) Wrems on (otherwise not terribly useful) iceballs and barrens.

Good point: having instant spam for Wrem who otherwise have low reproduction rate all across a wide empire might be a bit OP
Maybe the spam fucntion could only generate 0.5 billion pops instead of 1? That would halve the issue in half...

BTW: I know they are not very usefull but with time these critters cna make an otherwise useless planet into a half-decent produciton world which is quite a fact if we have like 30 such planets.

Also realise I really like spreading around the pops in the mbeginning when there are still some decisions to make which of the limited avaialble posp should go into which upstart planet - it just becomes trivial once there is a sufficient large pool to seed all of the planets of which ther are a ton after colonisation tech is reached

MAybe the later could also use some nerfing or the number of such planets reduced + speical resources assigned to them more then to other planets if not done so already to make them stand out somewhat but withouth making them evne more of a mid-game snawball factor

[AMX]

IMO spawning additional pop for free would be OP, period.

Maybe instead redirect population growth from full planets?

[zolobolo]

IMO spawning additional pop for free would be OP, period.

Maybe instead redirect population growth from full planets?

The effect is roughly the same the tech giving +100'000 growth every turn for

It is only once per planet/compatible pop type which is usually 2-3 pops
This is further reduced by the fact that the player has already likely spread the pops around till that point

A realistic scneario would be that wehn such and endgame tech is researched, around half of all planets are already mixed perfectly. Lets say the player has around 40 planets altogheter whih is not unusual on the largest galaxy. With a spam of 0.5 pop/per planet/not migrated pop type we are talking around the faction getting: 0*5*20*2=20 pops of various types. This is signifficant for sure but not necesseraly OP compared wth existing game elements: Its basically the full pop of a nearly perfectly populated gaia world

Its a one-time effect/planet/pop type and the other factios can researh it as wel l + the AI can "handle" it for sure from the getgo as it does not ened any interaction (auto-effect)

REdirection from full planets would also work well as far as automation goes but hte question then arrises to where it should be diverted. Maybe if all the planets gets equal share from the global surplus...

[gaerzi]

Indeed such a tech should not rely on transports from the pool to move around pops as that can wreck the economy in an insance and the player would not be happ abouth it

The thing could only kick in if there are enough surplus transports to allow moving population without reducing income.

And rather than generating population out of thin air, it could work by taking "fractional" quantities from multiple planets. E.g. take 100 000 pops from 10 planets, that give you a full million but without the effect of taking a full million from one planet. It could do that also by only taking population from planets that are at least halfway toward their next million of the given population type, so it's pretty much transparent.

Maybe it'd select one planet per turn, that has less than four types of species on it already, and where one more pop would not result in food shortage.