Population scaling experiment

[NotAYakk]

This is an experiment and has some rough edges.

The goal is to make population productivity scale with the number of pops on the planet. Meanwhile, I crank back growth by a similar factor.

The rough formula is (Pops)*(1+Pops/14). I have also divided the number of initial pops by 2 (from 27 down to 14), so you start with about the same production.

The cost to maintain and make new buildings also scales, and planet sizes are also shrunk.

I'm in the middle of tweaking the starting states so the AI doesn't make you bankrupt from too many specialists.

The end goal is that there are fewer tiny pops to move around, and what the pops do matter more. This should speed the end game up as well, and allow for simply ridiculously huge planets.

This effect is created by giving each population job a +7% increase to all pop jobs productivity and upkeep.

Then a 1% reduction in growth and assembly. (By doing both we are less likely to reach the singularity at 0% growth).

At 14 pops, this comes to x1.98 upkeep and productivity; so you get the productivity and costs of 28 pops. And a .86 * .86= 74% growth speed compared to vanilla.

At 30 pops, this is x3.1 upkeep and productivity, equal to 93 pops in vanilla. A 0.7 * 0.7 = 0.49 growth rate compared to vanilla.

At 50 pops, 0.25 growth rate and the productivity of 225 pops in vanilla.

At 100 pops, 0 growth rate and the productivity of 800 pops in vanilla.

Ideally the pop growth time, and the effective population size, would be roughly similar to vanilla, except with far fewer pops to manage.

Planet sizes are also shrunk significantly, and jobs whose primary function doesn't scale with productivity (as their upkeep does!) are given an additional entire-colony boost ability.

 

[NotAYakk]

I ran this in a test run with a random empire. Lessons:

1. % growth matter more, as it interacts with the -% growth penalty. It is limited by the reduction effect.

2. It is really easy to crash your economy (bankrupt your consumer goods with more researchers), as each pop starts mattering a WHOLE LOT at medium planet sizes.

3. +% does very different things with the same tooltips in vanilla. +20% physics research is actually +1 physics research. +5% specialist output is instead adding 5% to the multiplier. As I'm using the multiplier in the mod, +5% specialist output does next to nothing, while 1 physics research does a lot.

4. Happiness/stability doesn't matter enough, again because it adds to the +7% per pop scaling effect I added above.

5. Admin cap is really hard to get. It doesn't scale with population like other resources. Costs for administrators, meanwhile, do scale with planet population.

6. Trade value works because while it doesn't scale on the pop, it does scale on the planet.

7. Amenities works because its value is based on the value of each pop on the planet. It doesn't scale, but the pops do.

So the unity rework (removing admin cap workers) might make the mod work better.

8. Sprawl is naturally smaller due to smaller population totals.

9. Tiny planets are hard to manage; you have so few slots for buildings and districts every choice really, really matters.

10. As the cost to build stuff scales with planet population, "pre-building" a planet gives you significant discounts. This is probably more than made up for by the cumulative building upkeep costs.

I haven't tried abusing transporting populations. You could probably empty a planet, build a pile of stuff, then transport people in to get ridiculous ROI. Possibly infrastructure costs (building district) should scale with infrastructure, not population.

I will have to add code to deal with transportation of pops.