Stellaris Dev Diary #9 - Planets & Resources

[Safehold]

What I would like to see is the vision explanation behind these game design features, rather than short summations of what the features are.

 

[Zoston]

Also, while I agree that the food mechanic isn't all that realistic, in the end this is still a game. Having your population growth be resource dependant provides solid game-play, and calling that resource 'food' is traditional and will make more intuitive sense to most players.

This is really not the time for these discussions. We do not know what the whole economic system looks like. There is no sense in talking about minor facets such as food and population growth if we do not know what other economic systems there are. Maybe we're looking at an incredibly simple and boring Civ style city-management. Or maybe the whole system is so humongously broad and complex that they need to simplify things like food and population to keep it manageable. We won't know until the relevant dev diaries come out.

 

[Safehold]

We do not know what the whole economic system looks like.

Once you do know what the whole economic system looks like, that means the system is locked in and no changes can be made without expending additional resources. Thus feedback at that point becomes ineffective, because even if people wanted to put it in, the system is too developed to introduce changes.

Early on, the issue is not ignorance about what the system looks like, the issue is ignorance about what the system should look like, but that's more easily solved than when feature sets become locked in and unchangeable later on.

 

[TheAtreides84]

It is not even a good representation in history. Population growth comes from something very different. The more people you have the more laborer you get and that means more farmers, hunters etc..

Human society did manage to provide an excess of both goods and food at about the start of the Civ series so food is not important for population growth at all. Sure it is needed to sustain a population and starvation, though real, have not been a great factor in the decrease in population other than in very local places.

In fact... both famine, sickness and war have many times resulted in a boom in population growth after a short drop. This is also supported by evolution theory.

Research have found that the higher the rate of children who reach adulthood the lower the population growth. This seem to be the overwhelmingly driving factor in low child birth societies. There are very low correlation between rich or poor, religious or secular for example.

I'm not even sure that humans would start to procreate more just because they would colonize other planets, this is more a sociology-psychological issue. As long as people a content with two children you will never get a bigger population. You would need to incentivize people but that might be hard. So other methods might be necessary.

Might not be fun in a game, but worth to consider anyway.

Well, is a fact that early civilizations with large urban populations rose in fertile farmlands (the Nile, the Crescent). So there is a link between how much an area is suitable for farming, and how large a population can grow there (mostly: less farmers needed, more artisans and bureaucrats, easier to mantain a large civ). But aside from that, the problem is: how should we replace the food-based model in strategy games? I think there aren't many viable alternatives.

 

[ashbery76]

What's the difference between this game and Galactic Civilizations III?

This will be good.

 

[EntropyAvatar]

But aside from that, the problem is: how should we replace the food-based model in strategy games? I think there aren't many viable alternatives.

Well, currently in advanced nations, we don't actually need that many people to produce the food. One ironic statistic I've heard is that in the US, probably fewer people are employed growing food than in trying to deal with the consequences of over-consumption of food. So we could expect that in the future, growing food is probably not going to be a primary concern of a large part of the population.

I think in my ideal space 4x, population would be limited by some measure of the planetary biome (or at least friendly planetary biome: things that eat your colonists instead of the other way around wouldn't count...). Maybe you interventions on the planet grow the biome (or improve it's compatibility), or maybe they shrink the biome (global-scale strip mining, nuclear bombardment).

On top of the natural biome, you'd have constructed life support that has a maintenance fee (basically biome is "free life support"). This would start off pretty expensive, so only useful on otherwise uninhabitable planets. But eventually you'd get rich enough or the tech would be cheap enough that you could build it in large quantities on your city worlds. At that point, the sky is the limit for planetary population, as you can keep building more life support as needed, maybe with some kind of diminishing returns.

That's life support. I'd have growth rate basically be a factor of local living conditions (total life support divided by population, with a cap) as well as social factors, genetic factors and government policy. In most cases, population could keep growing past the local life support, leading to emigration, poor living conditions, unhappiness and general unrest.

 

[Guilu]

I'm fine with the "food for growth" model personally. I read "food" as "necessities" - and essentially, as necessities become more abundant, children become more affordable.
Now this doesn't explain why fertile lands produce more necessities, but that notion has another problem anyway : is outdoor farming even possible or viable on alien planets in the far future ?

 

[ranbir]

Clearing a mountain? That just doesn't feel right to me...why would you even want to do that....Seems a bizarre concept to even have...

Also I don't see a need for food to be a measured value on a galactic scale game...Usually that kind of issue is solved if we're travelling the stars. :|

 

[I_AM_King_Midas]

No we're not. I am really hoping that POPs will choose their own preferred tiles.

My hope is that there are certain types of pops which can occupy certain files. So if you build lots of science facilities but don't have scientists, it won't be fully operational. Each building could provide incentive to the population below to transition to be the right type of worker.

I guess the problem could be that it would feel to players they don't have enough direct control. Players didn't have that control in Victoria either though.

 

[CptWilly]

My hope is that there are certain types of pops which can occupy certain files. So if you build lots of science facilities but don't have scientists, it won't be fully operational. Each building could provide incentive to the population below to transition to be the right type of worker.

I guess the problem could be that it would feel to players they don't have enough direct control. Players didn't have that control in Victoria either though.

That could be an interesting way to counteract the concerns some have raised about building adjacency bonuses.... Go ahead and build your dedicated research planet with 25 tech labs if you want, but the bonus will be offset by understaffed facilities and unemployed non-scientists driving up militancy.

 

[I_AM_King_Midas]

One plus side of the abstraction of population could be how you depict or roleplay your people.

So imagine you see yourself as a swarm. Lots and lots of people. Then you could pretend 1 population unit is 100 billion lives.
Someone else could imagine that 1 pop is 1 million.

Just trying to look at it on the bright side.

I also think they will use this more easily for things like colonization. They could just move one person from a planet and put it on a ship vs wondering about how many would "realistically" work or how many would "realistically" be needed to start a colony. Now you can just imagine that whatever that number is, it's what number they sent.

 

[I_AM_King_Midas]

That could be an interesting way to counteract the concerns some have raised about building adjacency bonuses.... Go ahead and build your dedicated research planet with 25 tech labs if you want, but the bonus will be offset by understaffed facilities and unemployed non-scientists driving up militancy.

Yep it would mean that certain populations would be better suited for certain tasks too. Your very industrial civilization may take some time to learn how to become traders or militaristic vs just spamming a few buildings and instantly being better than someone who has been on that path for a while. It would take time for the population to adjust.

 

[EntropyAvatar]

Clearing a mountain? That just doesn't feel right to me...why would you even want to do that....Seems a bizarre concept to even have...

I'm hoping he meant glacier there. I'd certainly hope we don't need to level all of the mountains to make maximum use of a planet...

 

[yerm]

Food for growth is an antiquated holdover from historical games based around a time period where famine was routine and surplus resulted in population growth. Post-industrialization that standard has gone away, and to apply it to a future setting is a sorry (and frankly lazy) application.

Food would be better off as a non factor than a staple resource. Ideally food production would be more of a pass/fail than a resource, with new planets needing access to food to survive. Worlds capable of producing food can have agriculture set up, and planets not capable must be able to trade with one that is. Food consumption as some sort of limited resource that requires a significant amount of a futuristic society to generate seems really outdated and bad, whereas food consumption as a pass/fail with things like hydroponic production as a way to avoid blockages rather than shortages, now that sounds reasonable.

My hope is that there are certain types of pops which can occupy certain files. So if you build lots of science facilities but don't have scientists, it won't be fully operational. Each building could provide incentive to the population below to transition to be the right type of worker.

That could be an interesting way to counteract the concerns some have raised about building adjacency bonuses.... Go ahead and build your dedicated research planet with 25 tech labs if you want, but the bonus will be offset by understaffed facilities and unemployed non-scientists driving up militancy.

I don't see anything at all wrong with having comparative advantage as the game model for planetary economics. You streamline your worlds based on what they're good at, some worlds settling for what they're comparatively best at (even if absolutely better elsewhere) to fill holes, you trade for what you lack, it's reasonably simple and works. Having EVERY planet need heavy industry, and farming, and some labs? Silly. Nothing really all that crazy with having planet New York City that focuses economics, and planet Detroit focusing manufacturing, and planet Los Angeles focused culture, etc.

 

[ggsimmonds]

I'm actually not excited about this DD. If anything I am slightly disappointed. It seems as if they are going with the cookie cutter approach to planet/resource management. Compared to the other reveals this one was a bit underwhelming.

 

[SIEGE-109]

1. Tiles. I don't think this is really a serious issue. The tiles look ugly, but it's purely a graphical problem that can be easily corrected. The tiles should be mapped to the planet's surface, but because only half the planet is visible in normal view, use a Mollweide Projection:

Or only map one side of the planet, like Ascendancy:

2. Civ-like resources. Yes apparently they thought Vicky was too complex and hard to simulate. I would have preferred they just tried harder to get a fullscale simulation working properly. But if they do this right it won't necessarily be boring like civ 5. I used to play Civ 2 a lot and it was WAYY better than Civ 5. Better balance, fun to play. They need to put the elements together right. It's more an art than a science. And simple building blocks don't necessarily mean the whole project will be over-simplified.

3. Empire-Wide Warehouse. No. This is just plain silly. Abstractions are a necessity, but they have to be abstractions of things that make sense. Where are those resources? Are they in hyperspace?? If the abstraction represents cargo ships transporting resources to where they're needed, why do they get there instantaneously? Might as well ask where that fuse from the intro to Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol is. Short answer: The Imperial Warehouse is on the other side of the fourth wall. Don't use it. Modern processors are powerful enough to handle many freighters that transport the resources between planets. It would be consistent with the level of detail you're using in the rest of the game.

4. One pop per tile. This actually doesn't appear to be the case. In the first screenshot there are 5 settled tiles. 1 lacks a city and is less productive. 1 of the cities appears denser and more productive than the others. Apparently the race icon shows who lives there and the city icon shows how many and how developed.

5. Command Economy. I think the actions of the player represent not only the government, but also the sum of individual decisions by the people. The actions of the civilization as a whole. This is an abstraction. As a player I don't want my guys going left and right doing things I can't control. That was a major problem in MoO3: things you had literally no control over. I want to be able to directly control anything in my civilization, or turn it over to an AI following my guidelines.

 

[brobman22]

How can your pops be abstracted if they have factions and ethos?

 

[SIEGE-109]

It's roleplaying. Your pops have values, you play accordingly. You select the majority's values at the beginning. You don't like their values, you push for something else.

 

[Guilu]

I don't see anything at all wrong with having comparative advantage as the game model for planetary economics. You streamline your worlds based on what they're good at, some worlds settling for what they're comparatively best at (even if absolutely better elsewhere) to fill holes, you trade for what you lack, it's reasonably simple and works. Having EVERY planet need heavy industry, and farming, and some labs? Silly. Nothing really all that crazy with having planet New York City that focuses economics, and planet Detroit focusing manufacturing, and planet Los Angeles focused culture, etc.

Here's what's wrong : Say you want to be a scientist, as a native of Omaggus 3. You've wanted to since you were a kid. But you can't be a scientist, because there are no such jobs on Omaggus 3. In fact, the only place in the empire where science is a viable career is Nullamir, 400 lightyears away, filled with aliens who have a government incompatible with your ideology. They probably don't even speak proper Omaggussian ! On the other hand, Nullamir has masses of uneducated people who sit on their hands, because the whole economy is based around being the research center of the empire and you need a doctorate to get anywhere. Also, Nullamir imports everything from other planets. Somehow it's cheaper to produce it offworld than to employ the inactive locals !
Do you see how silly this is ? This is what specialisation implies. Of course, no 4X has ever dealt with this absurdity.

 

[Tim_Ward]

Therefore it will be advantageous to construct your power plants in proximity to each other, to achieve optimal efficiency.

Actions, such as clearing tiles, cost Energy Credits to perform.

So, and fee free to stop me if this is incorrect, if I was playing the game in these screenshots and I wanted to clear one of those tiles of jungle on Omaggus III and I didn't have enough energy, I could resolve this problem by building more power plants on Hurum?

If I want to clear jungle on Omaggus III... I should build more power plants on Hurum? Close together, for some reason?

Clearing jungle... so building power plants, as in one of these things... on another planet?

I... uh...

No, I think this needs bit of a rethink.

Mostly in terms of what these elements are representing rather than the actual core of the thing.

I like the idea of breaking planets in to regions and having seperate development and population characteristics for each one, that's good and a noticable improvement over the usual 4x mode of just having planets on which you build hydrophonic farms and stuff.

But the packaging, the presentation, needs to be rethought entirely.