First of all - I really like those new features and I think they have a huge potential to vastly increase the gaming experience.
Second - currently - and I think everyone agrees here - it is too static.
I know it's already been said that both features will be extended for coming rounds.
So why this thread already?
The earlier there is a constructive discussion about features the earlier developers get an idea how players want certain ideas to turn out.
So here everyone should collect their ideas about Pop and Gov and in which way they could influence the game to make it more fun.
Population Size
From what I gather from the manual it is planned that population increase is somewhat randomly decided every few ticks. I don't like this part of the idea. Generally randomness could lead to random winners in the end. Imagine two planets are very close and in the last few ticks one of them gets huge pop growth while the other doesn't which leads to the few more res needed to win.
Any natural population is decided by birth rate and death rate which itself are depending on numerous factors.
How could this work in PA?
First of all we have 5 different races - any of them has different breeding and life cycles. I.e. Terrans get an average of 2 offsprings that life for 80 years (ticks) while insectoid Xandathrii get 100 that life for 5.
So Xans gonna have a very high population quickly while others grow slower (but have more flexible individuals - more to that later).
Other factors would be quality of environment and catastrophic events. Better environment leads to faster breeding and longer lifespans. In game this could be determined by resources you spend to create better breeding conditions (more parks, day cares, health care for Terrans etc...). You start with an average quality of 50. You can spend up to 15% every tick on improving quality which can rise to a max of 100. If you decide to spennd 5% or less quality will drop to 0 where there is virtually no incentive for your population to breed anymore.
Catastrophic events in this setting are simply attacks on your planet (and should be restricted to that) and ships dying.
As we all know that some races get attacked more often there needs to countermeasures - i.e. a bunkers that can protect your population.
Ships dying simply means pilots dying - there would be a fixed numbers of pilots for each shipclass which gets killed when ships get destroyed or stunned (Imagine stunning as a heavy radiation that kills pilots but not electronics - ships fly home by auto-pilot later). This is simply to not hamper Cath even more.
Population Areas
What I am missing in the current area is military personnel. With the above mentioned pilots there is a need to have a part of your population available for military. So if you have 1.000.000 pop - 20% military meaning 200.000 in that branch. Appx. 50% of them should be able to pilot a ship so you have 100.000 pilots. For a fighter (depending on race) you'll need 1-3. For a battleship 500-1000.
If u mismanage your population you won't be able to have a huge fleet either.
Population Research, Construction and Production
A proper population micromanagment if properly thought through and implemented has the chance to replace current static Res, Cons and Prod. Basically the more people you have the faster you research and build and the more ships you can build.
Research is pretty straightforward - 10000 scientist will come to a result quicker than 1000.
Constructions should be handled more flexible than they currently are. Currently it is pretty strange that you pay more the more constructions there are. Cost should be dependant on type of building.
As for the bunkers - each can protect 100k people.
Factories - they really should have a limited production capacity. Each factory has a capacity of 5000 which means 5000 fighters or 50 battleships can be under contruction in a single factory.
No more ditching out of 1000 bs at the same time - unless planet has the capacity to do so - this gonna limit stockpiling options.
Governments
Only a few short ideas here.
There should be more governmental systems (10 maybe).
Governments should have influence on population aswell.
It should be possible to change the Government at the cost of a civil war (5%-20% population decrease depening on how drastic the change is).
Implementation
Population Size depending on Race and Quality of Environment should be fairly easy. The formulas are rather simple.
Military personnel would be more complicated. If you don't have enough pilots left - what happens with unoccupied ships.
New contructions - probably most complicated.
More Governments and impact on population - easy.
That's it from me now. I really want to see turn pop and gov turn into something great (doesn't mean that mine is the way to go). So plz everyone help devs to find a decent solution