Population...htf does it work?

[bobthe]

Ok, so I know the intention of the population section to replace engineer and how you set it up, but how does it work exactly? I can't find anything on the details in the manual. I have two big questions:

(1) How does rounding work? I.E. if the resulting construction/research/production/whatever time is "10.8 ticks" will it actually take 10 ticks or 11 ticks? This could affect micromanagement of the population.

(2) The description in the manual seems to imply that the effect of your settings increases the longer you leave it set that way, but I don't see anything detailing how that works. Does it actually work that way or is it just worded extremely poorly?

**edit: I should have titled this "Population...htf does it work?" but i can't change it now :P

[Tietäjä]

Rounding is always down. So 10.8 or 10.1 or is 10.

It's worded poorly. You just assign the 100 you have to different areas, so it's basically just more flexible engineering. The formulaes are given on the low end of the population page.

The amount of population (the running number) makes no difference. You always just assign the 100, and that's it (once every 48 hours you can change it, just like engineering).

[bobthe]

Great, thanks

**edit: AAHH! Evil forum changed my ascii smiley into a graphic [insert sad face here since i can't uncheck the "disable smileys" box in an already submitted reply]

[bobthe]

Ok one more clarification question:

How does population research bonus stack with research laboratories? Let's say you get a 20% bonus from labs and a 20% bonus from population. Does that make the adjusted time 40% lower, or 20% lower than 20% lower? i.e. are they applied one after the other (and in what order) or is the total effect combined before being applied to the research time?

[The Real Arfy]

As keiz said, there's formulae at the bottom of the page.

Research (RP) 120 50% 20% 120 * (1 + (50 + 20)/100) Total: 204

This is for a cathaar with max. population in research and 20% research labs.

You have 204 research points per tick. If you look at the tech tree in the manual, you'll see that fighter hulls are 2400 RPs. This means it takes 2400/204 = 11.76 = 11 ticks to complete.

Hope this helped.

[Dorraj]

best idea for the population feature

check it out!

it has my vote

[wuputah]

I wrote up this in my gal forum, figured I'd post it here:

Results of population calculations always get rounded down, so you want to use the lowest % to get the effect you want. To make life easy, I've done the math for you.

For construction and shipwrights, you need:
- 1% to lower time by 1 tick
- 9% to lower time by 2 ticks
- 17% to lower time by 3 ticks
- 26% to lower time by 4 ticks
- 34% to lower time by 5 ticks

This works against you for security - each 1% in security adds 0.70 max alertness, so:

- 2% gives you +1
- 3% gives you +2
- 5% gives you +3
- 6% gives you +4
- 8% gives you +5
- 9% gives you +6
- 10% gives you +7

For higher values, add these together until you get the number you want. e.g., 15% gives you 10% + 5% = 7 + 3 = +10 alertness.

Note that adding 1%, 4%, and 7% are useless - use 0%, 3%, and 6% instead and allocate the point elsewhere.

For research, things are a lot more complicated. Here is a spreadsheet of data (copy and paste link):
users.wuputah.com/~jd/research-times.html

Using that spreadsheet you can see exactly how a particular total % bonus will give you a particular amount of RP production, and then you can see how long each research will take. This way you can determine how much you will gain or lose by changing something a few percentage points. Remember to add together all bonuses (negative and positive) - your population allocation, your % of research lab constructions (up to 20%), and government (if applicable).

[SpaceMonkey]

I wrote a calc, seemed easiest

http://blern.gotadsl.co.uk/popcalc.php

Mining is missing because it's 1 for 1, research and alert are in 5% increments or they'd be too long.

Tbh it might not be accurate, I started with what the manual said then checked it in the game before ticks started, they were not in agreement.

[wuputah]

A calc was the next logical step, I wasn't much in the mood for coding last night. Also note that research bonuses can be as high as 70% if you have 20% research buildings.

My giant spreadsheet calc'd out to each 1% can be handy... for instance if I take 2% off research (down to 48%) I can get an extra tick off of shipwrights or construction, and I only lose a tick of research time on the very longest of researches, e.g.:

mining - 25%
research - 48%
construction - 1%
shipwrights - 26%

Works pretty nicely for fast prod times, or you can shift some of the guys to construction if you want more buildings.

[Ultimate Newbie]

I did an excel spreadsheet as well, and it didnt seem to agree with in-game - i asked myk to check it out, see what i was doing wrong, but he's forgotten about it i'm sure, at least untill he reads this thread and feels all guilty .

<3

[wuputah]

The only thing that is off (from what I can tell) is if you take my % and try to infer RP, you need to use the highest RP value for that %. This is only a problem with Cat because they get more than one RP for each % (1.2 ea). For instance, with +10% cat, you get 132 RP, but in my spreadsheet +10% is next to both 131 RP and 132 RP. Such is the problem with basing it on RP and then trying to backwards infer percentages. Trying to do that was tricky but I think I did it correctly. The calculation for negative percentages might be wrong, though.

Anyway, here is the source XLS:
users.wuputah.com/~jd/research-times.xls

And here it is on Google spreadsheets:
spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pwROy9A8TSIY5YMILvjoKCQ

Sorry about the lack of proper links but i can't post them yet since I don't have 15 posts.

[wuputah]

I also meant to note that I found it amazing that with Cat you can get up to 228 RP... you have to go democracy (which is rough) + 20% research buildings + 50% pop allocation, but wow, pumping out a 48 tick research (4800 RP) in 21 ticks is amazing.

Woot, up to 5 posts now...

[Aragno]

Seems population is a though one this round

Here is my version of a calc for pop. Also have all the possible researches so you can see how long each will take with the different research settings.
http://beta.5th-element.org/utils/pop.php