When to add Food Production, Colonial Hospital, Cities?

Gauntlet03

Join Date 01/2004

+139

Personally I think your logic is flawed on cities.

People do not = production in a society of that level of technology, cognitive and manual automation make the "human" individual a non-worker. Sure, you still may want/need a certain number of scientists and supervisors, but the VAST majority of individuals will be consumers, and not much else... perhaps employed in service roles that somehow, uniquely, cannot be automated by VR, programs, or robots....

More people quickly equates to more Consumption. Meaning more resources being wasted on non-vital needs. Unless there is a widespread (perhaps well founded) paranoia and rejection of robots and AI the only reason to have more people is to produce the bare minimum of "geniuses" and supervisors Per-Capita your civilization would want/need.

Where once in the past a nation could well brag that the size of their population automatically meant greater industrial capacity, economic ability, and military might... that dynamic is quickly reversing... more citizens is more mouths to feed with dwindling resources and more people to control (every citizen is also a potential rebel) and regulate. Oh... also pollution and waste products of that consumption...

However, in gameplay, this factor is very emotionally dissatisfying to players... You'll be happy to know that population is going to be adjusted to give a bigger bonus to production, which should make pop-growth a valid strategy once again.

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Quoting Gauntlet03,

reply 1

Personally I think your logic is flawed on cities.

No it's not. Your points are quite reasonable, and I wouldn't expect that it would scale on a 1:1 ratio (population:production). But I think it should scale better than it currently does.

People do not = production in a society of that level of technology, cognitive and manual automation make the "human" individual a non-worker. Sure, you still may want/need a certain number of scientists and supervisors, but the VAST majority of individuals will be consumers, and not much else... perhaps employed in service roles that somehow, uniquely, cannot be automated by VR, programs, or robots....

Oh sure, this is true and I don't disagree with you.

More people quickly equates to more Consumption. Meaning more resources being wasted on non-vital needs. Unless there is a widespread (perhaps well founded) paranoia and rejection of robots and AI the only reason to have more people is to produce the bare minimum of "geniuses" and supervisors Per-Capita your civilization would want/need.

Yes, synthetics should have a better scalability, I would think. I still don't really disagree with you.

However, in gameplay, this factor is very emotionally dissatisfying to players... You'll be happy to know that population is going to be adjusted to give a bigger bonus to production, which should make pop-growth a valid strategy once again.

Rather than argue minutiae when we basically agree with each other anyway, let's try it this way: Under the current game mechanics (July 2017), when IS it a valid strategy to add food or a city? Which food option(s)? More than one city? If I don't get "more" of something (production), then can I get "more" of something else (approval? influence? more people to work in my starbase mines, or maybe my on-planet mines?)

There has to be a good reason for building a city, or else why bother putting it into the game? I'm just trying to identify when I should consider doing so.

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admiralWillyWilber

Join Date 05/2009

+99

Well something that would be more realistic, but hard to implement. Is limited need for things. Say what you want, but there is a limited number of goods, and services on this planet at any given time. Your right the number of qualified individuals can increase, but basically you see a shifting of who provides the resources, not an increase of resources. This is dependent on factors galactic events, but once a certain number of things get filled. New ones only waste space, cost money, and eventually close. Basically the faction with the lowest economy would get the jobs. The faction with the highest economy would lose jobs, unless they lent money which in turn would increase the economy. Trade would need to be more important. That still is more significant than population. This would cause fluaction of factions, but would be more realistic.

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That's all fine and dandy, but I need strategy help with the game as it currently runs.

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admiralWillyWilber

Join Date 05/2009

+99

Asteroid mines are better for production. cities still could be used as a secondary source for production, but they are better used for their adjancencies.

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Quoting BIF,

reply 4

That's all fine and dandy, but I need strategy help with the game as it currently runs.

If you care at all about the UP. Population = Vote power.

Cities are more used for adjacency bonuses more than for driving up population. Unless someone can tell me otherwise the usefulness of hospitals and other growth buildings are dubious at best. If population gets too high moral suffers, and you get penalized in production and EVERY kind of stat growth. So then you have to waste more precious slots on entertainment centers.

A rule of thumb I follow is, any base 12+ planet gets a single city. My capital gets two. And I make sure the city is directly in the middle of as many important buildings as possible. Any base 20+ planets can use an extra city too. They've got lots of land to slap them in the middle of buildings. You basically need max terraforming tech to make cities viable on lesser planet, and even then the 12+ ones will be better off and more flexible.

Also if you dont mind mods, make a "GalCiv3GlobalDefs" xml file in notepad and throw it in the folder Documents/My Games/GC3Crusade/Mods/(whatever name you want)/Game

<GalCiv3Global>

<MaxNumTurns>1000</MaxNumTurns>

<DefaultTileMoveCost>1</DefaultTileMoveCost>

<MinTileMoveCost>0.1</MinTileMoveCost>

<ExploreTileRandomRange>50</ExploreTileRandomRange>

<MinManufacturingSlider>0.01</MinManufacturingSlider>

<StartImprovementLevel>0</StartImprovementLevel>

<StarbaseModuleSalvageMultiplier>25</StarbaseModuleSalvageMultiplier>

<ShipyardMaxSponsorCount>5</ShipyardMaxSponsorCount>

<ShipyardSalvageMultiplier>5</ShipyardSalvageMultiplier>

<BaseStarbaseDef>BasicStarbase</BaseStarbaseDef>

<VigilantStarbaseDef>VigilantStarbase</VigilantStarbaseDef>

<BaseShipyardDef>BasicShipyard</BaseShipyardDef>

<GamePacingPacingDef>GamePacingOptions</GamePacingPacingDef>

<ResearchRatePacingDef>ResearchRateOptions</ResearchRatePacingDef>

<BaseMiningBaseBuildTime>8</BaseMiningBaseBuildTime>

<NonStackingEffects>MoveCost</NonStackingEffects>

<DefaultEjectTile>Northwest</DefaultEjectTile>

<RushCostMultiplier>25</RushCostMultiplier>

<CapitalImprovement>ColonyCapital</CapitalImprovement>

<CivilizationCapitalImprovement>CivilizationCapital</CivilizationCapitalImprovement>

<IdeologyTraitBaseCost>10</IdeologyTraitBaseCost>

<CoercionForgiveness>0.00</CoercionForgiveness>

<CoercionMaxPenalty>0.00</CoercionMaxPenalty>

<PopulationToProductionExponent>0.75</PopulationToProductionExponent>

<PopulationToProductionMultiplier>1.0</PopulationToProductionMultiplier>

I'm not sure how much of that you need, but the PopulationToProduction is the actual value. Default is .5

This tiny change makes population more valuable.

Quoting admiralWillyWilber,

reply 3

Well something that would be more realistic, but hard to implement. Is limited need for things. Say what you want, but there is a limited number of goods, and services on this planet at any given time. Your right the number of qualified individuals can increase, but basically you see a shifting of who provides the resources, not an increase of resources. This is dependent on factors galactic events, but once a certain number of things get filled. New ones only waste space, cost money, and eventually close. Basically the faction with the lowest economy would get the jobs. The faction with the highest economy would lose jobs, unless they lent money which in turn would increase the economy. Trade would need to be more important. That still is more significant than population. This would cause fluaction of factions, but would be more realistic.

It's already represented by approval. High pop = low moral. Entertainment center can just be thought of as a space mall. Buy food, luxuries, watch games, movies, whatever there.

There just isnt any in game reason to go for as high of a pop as possible anymore. Which sucks. Maybe high population shouldn't drive manufacturing up as much. But it DEFINITELY should give you better tax income and you have the potential of more researchers for tech advances. Legions for attack and defense should also be tied into population instead of social production so the AI can actually defend 90% of their planets. Somehow has to be working on those big ships flying around in space too, why isn't pop deciding your ship limit as well?

Pop is still very important in a scifi setting on a galactic scale. The Synthetic races should be scarier because of that fact.

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Gauntlet03

Join Date 01/2004

+139

There is your answer really... as of now there just isn't much reason to develop pop. I plunk down 2 cities on a planet MAX and mostly out of habit than anything else. That being said, Brad has stated that pop to raw production will be adjusted to 1:1. Which will certainly make it worthwhile to produce massive city planets again.

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Thank you all for sharing this information.

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My rule of thumb: aim for 100% approval, period. You're better off reducing population down to get the 100% (without resorting to extreme measures, like building colony ships and decommissioning them). Growth "bonuses" are sometimes a curse; and regardless, I never see you coming out ahead building hospitals. Will you ever make back your social production you sunk into the hospital because you grew faster? Rarely.

Cities are good if you have the approval--for the +2 adjacency bonus. The added benefit from population is very small.

If you have good approval, it makes sense to have food worlds. Some worlds have good bonus tiles; others have a few useless tiles you might as well stick a farm on. 2 food is better than building a factory and getting 2.5% of 6 production. On food worlds, you get better food-per-tile, because you're leveraging the bonus tiles and adjacency bonuses. Surround Kim's Refuge with food, the same way you would surround a Space elevator with factories. The real power in Kim's refuge is it gives 1 food per level--unlike Farms' 0.5 food per level. If you get up above 10 food on a single planet, the % food buildings like Fertility centers give +10% food per level, which comes out to more than 1 food per level (plus the fertility centers themselves are conveying +2 population adjacency bonus, vs. farms' +1). Food worlds' approval can be in the pits; they will still give the same food.

The catch on the flip side is not to overdo it. You can have an awesome food world producing 20 food, but if you aren't building the cities to use it, then it's wasted. You're better off building a starport than a farm you're not using. +2 ship production per turn comes out to about 2.5bc per-turn in money, if you apply it to Treasure Hunters.

IMHO, legions need to cost population. "Garrison legion" should cost pop, but not a legion. Make the growth bonuses useful.

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That's so weird- I have a mod to do just that - set pop_to_prod at 0.75. https://forums.galciv3.com/484167/page/1/#3685111

It'll do until the default gets changed to something where population is more, um, useful.

As for when to use farm/cities/hospital- put the three of them adjacent and you will growth rates from .4-.6B a turn.

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I will upload a new version for 2.32 later tonight, as some info as changed in the globaldefs xml.

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Yes pop is still important it give raw production that is research, production and wealth. Due to how math works you can generally assume that percentage are better when your raw increases. When bases number increase to being quite large then your perecentages become effective.

If you have 1.7 raw production from 3 pop a 10% increase will make it 1.87 so nothing.

If you have 6 pop lets and say 3.4 raw production you basically just made that 10% twice as effective.

Basically pop is still king and approval is coming in second with most like +1 and +2 buildings coming in next.

Percent buildings are crap. I moaned how they gutted them they are still gutted.

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Don't moan, just do a mod to set them (percent buildings) as you want.

Maybe set the first level back to 5% (+5% per adjacent) and put the 2nd level to the same but with a +1 production. Those would be worth building, I betcha.

For a me right now, the only value a factory has is to add a +1 to the surrounding core mine and space elevator. Same for the xeno labs and computer cores.

I see the AI build 4-8 of the xeno labs to get a whole 20% more science on a planet. Wasteful.

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The thing is though I could just make the factories more effective but the thing is it still won't change much on how I would set up a planet unless I really buffed them or made the things like elevator more potent so percentage boost come into play more and sooner. In the new system it's makes little difference I would be still basically doing the same thing mathematically. Plus I would have to do something with the mining resource percent buildings as well and that seems like unpaid work.

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admiralWillyWilber

Join Date 05/2009

+99

This was caused from a lot of post complaints in three base. In the Beta they wanted to make both buildings, and adjancencies stronger. A lot of people specifically requested a lot weaker buildings.

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Well with have certainly got some weaker buildings that are going to be doing very little except on very large planets and maybe some smaller specialised ones.

Adjacency bonuses didn't really need to be a have important role it was extra for understanding it, but it's in large part still random. It's more important in some cases than before.

We also have the holy trinity of buildings in space dock, space elevator and deep mining core.

So I guess they for the most part delivered GJ stardock.

We got better adjacency, weaker buildings and stronger buildings.

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aquatic science is SO much better than any other, due to the adjacencies giving +1 raw. I don't even look at percentages in an aquatic game, until at least turn 100. Then I shoot down the tech path and the percentages make my adjacency +1s skyrocket.

it would be nice if upgrades, maybe gave a percentage and a small raw (0.1, such as the new Path and Iridium buildings for influence?)

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