What about manpower?

[Krajzen]

I am wondering about that. Screenshots don't show any manpower counter so far, so I guess there is no such thing as manpower (and that's good, it's very hard to come up with adequate army sizes for so alien setting). But I think war should cost something more than money, some cost in lives, so an empire won't be able to constantly spam armies for the eternity thanks to constant money source, like in some poor strategy games. It would also allow on many interesting interactions and customization options, for example an empire can focus on developing AI Soldiers tech to decrease organic deaths, but they have various advantages and penalties and you may risk their uprising... Or modifying your soldiers with implants so they become separate cyborg caste etc.
Also, some war weariness would be cool mechanic.

What do you think?

 

[aitaituo]

It could be just directly tied to POPs.

 

[valergain]

I'm sure there will be some limit. Problem is we don't know what resources we have to work with. We don't even know if money is a thing.

 

[Krajzen]

We don't even know if money is a thing.

I have just realized all space games take money as a granted thing. An economy without money could be fascinating

Generally I'm wondering about loosely designing 4x game which attempts to break as many usual tropes of 'space empires' as possible... I'll do it as a hobby or as an introduction to some SF short.

 

[FelixG]

Manpower would be pretty silly to worry about, especially with hte level of automation that would be possible at that time. You could have a couple of dozen people run a warship.

The biggest draw would be MAYBE ground armies, and thats assuming they dont make heavy use of UAVs, UGVs, and potentially even remote soldiers like in the movie Surrogate, which would be the ideal form of soldiers. Human minds safely aboard ships overhead piloting remote robots on the ground that are churned out of local deployed factories, that way you can lose as many soldiers as needed on a campaign but the minds and experience arent lost unless the mothership of the invasion is threatened.

 

[Velorian]

There could be a counter for experienced personnel. In most space games you can suicide your entire fleet and build a new one without any issue, realistically you'd just have lost your best and brightest people who were presumably manning those ships...

Sort of like the officer counter in HoI3.

 

[FirstCitizen80]

I think manpower and officer should all just be abstracted into a resources known as 'Military Potential" or something, since the ways various races and tech levels could do things would be too varied.

 

[Velorian]

I think manpower and officer should all just be abstracted into a resources known as 'Military Potential" or something, since the ways various races and tech levels could do things would be too varied.

I wouldn't mind. Mainly I want the player to be encouraged to scrap their ships at shipyards instead of ordering a new fleet and when it arrives suicide the old one.

 

[zukodark]

I have just realized all space games take money as a granted thing. An economy without money could be fascinating

Generally I'm wondering about loosely designing 4x game which attempts to break as many usual tropes of 'space empires' as possible... I'll do it as a hobby or as an introduction to some SF short.

I am all for a system for a value of "economic power" which just blank out increases permanently by things like trade, factories, trade goods and such, but decreases permanently by building fleets, or just generally building stuff. Thus, you don't make some kind of abstract sense of currency each month, it is rather like ships take so much of your economy to keep, repair and build. This system would make sense in all kinds of government forms, as it is not based on currency, but just how much stuff your empire can afford to keep. You could still take loans and such, which just adds an additional chunk of economic power. In the case of fleets, if they are damaged and in repair on a planet, the economic power there decreases, and thus you must plan ahead to make sure your planets can afford to repair your ships. If they can't, the ships will not be repaired.

 

[Vishaing]

The Devs have already mentioned that Pops are very important in this game, so there probably isn't a Global Manpower pool like in EUIV, but instead soldiers/ships will be recruited from Pops, more like Victoria 2.

This makes sense as this game is about Colonization, and by doing it this way you can naturally make it difficult to raise military forces in newly colonized territory without relying on arbitrarily defined poorly balanced nerfs like EUIV.