Casualties with the new pop system

[Normannus]

As we all know, currently the only casualties sustained in war are actual military units (ships/armies) and civilian pops from planetary bombardment/invasion. Since there is no direct link between pops and military units, however, you can lose infinite military units without it ever affecting your population. As long as you have the alloys to build a new ship, there will never be any problem finding people to man it.
With the current pop system this more or less makes sense. While we can’t say exactly how many people are represented by a pop, it is certainly in the hundreds of millions, and so only a massive defeat would ever cause the loss of a pop. What I would like to see, with 4.0 making pops much more granular, would be for pops to be lost as military casualties.
I would do this by changing how naval capacity works, and changing it from the current soft cap which represents your logistical carrying capacity to how many people you have on hand, or alternatively creating this as a new and separate capacity. It would be generated by the number of pops employed at a Barracks building, and when you sustain naval casualties it would track that and periodically kill the employed pops there. With current pop ratios, it would be something like 1 employed pop generates 100 naval capacity, and 100 destroyed naval capacity destroys 1 pop.

 

[Halberdier King]

I feel like, with billions or trillions of people in your empire, the ship crew deaths would just be too small to have any real impact on population. Like, even if each corvette had 1 million crew members, that still might not have that much impact on an interstellar empire's population.

 

[Egodeus]

I agree with @Halberdier King there, the amount of people in an interstellar empire easily swamps out the amount of crew needed in any war fleets.

But the point is that not everyone is trained enough to work on those military vessels. Thus I would like to have some sort of crew training pool, you could have a military academy that you can build a limited number of (perhaps one per planet) that provides you with a certain amount of crew to allow you to build a number of ships with. It should have a pool that gets filled up, and the pool size and refill rate increases with the number of fleet academies you have, but each ship you have built decreases the refill rate (to account for the normal accidents, retirement, etc. of an active fleet) Thus if you need to replace immediate losses you need to have ready trained crew in the pool, but to maintain a large fleet you need to keep you refill rate positive.

You could even have it so that you can upgrade the academies into two paths, either quality of the training, or amount of recruits. The recruit pool would have a quality number that is simply a weighted average of the quality your academies produce divided by how many recruits that academy produces. If you want to make it so that everyone is incentivized to have at least one top-notch military academy (Think West Point, Starfleet Academy, Imperial Military Academy etc.) you could have it so that the final quality is say 30% of the best quality your academies produce, and 70% the weighted average to show that the top positions are more likely to be given to graduates of the best academies. You could even have it so that your government type affects the ratio, with Monarchies having less weight given to the top academies (to represent lineage being a more important factor than skill) and democracies giving more weight to the top academies (to represent at least trying to be a meritocracy, I guess).

 

[Calvax]

I agree with @Halberdier King there, the amount of people in an interstellar empire easily swamps out the amount of crew needed in any war fleets.

But the point is that not everyone is trained enough to work on those military vessels. Thus I would like to have some sort of crew training pool, you could have a military academy that you can build a limited number of (perhaps one per planet) that provides you with a certain amount of crew to allow you to build a number of ships with. It should have a pool that gets filled up, and the pool size and refill rate increases with the number of fleet academies you have, but each ship you have built decreases the refill rate (to account for the normal accidents, retirement, etc. of an active fleet) Thus if you need to replace immediate losses you need to have ready trained crew in the pool, but to maintain a large fleet you need to keep you refill rate positive.

You could even have it so that you can upgrade the academies into two paths, either quality of the training, or amount of recruits. The recruit pool would have a quality number that is simply a weighted average of the quality your academies produce divided by how many recruits that academy produces. If you want to make it so that everyone is incentivized to have at least one top-notch military academy (Think West Point, Starfleet Academy, Imperial Military Academy etc.) you could have it so that the final quality is say 30% of the best quality your academies produce, and 70% the weighted average to show that the top positions are more likely to be given to graduates of the best academies. You could even have it so that your government type affects the ratio, with Monarchies having less weight given to the top academies (to represent lineage being a more important factor than skill) and democracies giving more weight to the top academies (to represent at least trying to be a meritocracy, I guess).

This is how the star trek spin off of stellaris did it. An otherwise not great game that was dead on delivery, but the officer mechanic fit with the setting. Ships needed a certain number of officers each which didn't represent the whole crew but at least the trained specialists you needed to run it.

Though I don't think this would necessarily be a good fit for stellaris. I can't see what problem it would solve. It would just shift naval cap to another resource.

 

[arosenberger14]

Maybe not with ships, but I think massive armies should cost some level of pops. If you're conquering or occupying a planet block by block that should hurt.

 

[Normannus]

I agree with @Halberdier King there, the amount of people in an interstellar empire easily swamps out the amount of crew needed in any war fleets.

But the point is that not everyone is trained enough to work on those military vessels. Thus I would like to have some sort of crew training pool, you could have a military academy that you can build a limited number of (perhaps one per planet) that provides you with a certain amount of crew to allow you to build a number of ships with. It should have a pool that gets filled up, and the pool size and refill rate increases with the number of fleet academies you have, but each ship you have built decreases the refill rate (to account for the normal accidents, retirement, etc. of an active fleet) Thus if you need to replace immediate losses you need to have ready trained crew in the pool, but to maintain a large fleet you need to keep you refill rate positive.

You could even have it so that you can upgrade the academies into two paths, either quality of the training, or amount of recruits. The recruit pool would have a quality number that is simply a weighted average of the quality your academies produce divided by how many recruits that academy produces. If you want to make it so that everyone is incentivized to have at least one top-notch military academy (Think West Point, Starfleet Academy, Imperial Military Academy etc.) you could have it so that the final quality is say 30% of the best quality your academies produce, and 70% the weighted average to show that the top positions are more likely to be given to graduates of the best academies. You could even have it so that your government type affects the ratio, with Monarchies having less weight given to the top academies (to represent lineage being a more important factor than skill) and democracies giving more weight to the top academies (to represent at least trying to be a meritocracy, I guess).

I think my assumption is always that the warships we see are representative of more than one ship, and we have no idea what the crew size is like. After all, a colony ship (which transports enough people to make up one pop on arrival), uses 200 alloys, while cruisers and battleships are multiple times that. Sure, alloy cost and people transported are not equivalent, but I think it’s very believable that a single “battleship” represents multiple capital ships and support ships with a total crew of multiple millions of people. A late game fleet with dozens of these battleships could very easily have hundreds of millions of souls on board, and the destruction of a doomstack with a couple hundred naval capacity worth of ships could well be similar to any major battle in our history, like a naval battle equivalent of Stalingrad. It isn’t going to depopulate a planet, but I think it would be reasonable for something like that to cost you a few pops.

 

[GuildenSpur]

If the future belongs to AI or in assisting humans, not many systems on modern ships would need actual humans to function or could be handled remotely. So less pops needed and remote controlled to avoid skilled personal dying with the ship.