Changes to population

[Cain]

At this point we have the following changes we can make to our planets population. Usually sane players have set those on 25% mining, 50% research and 25% construction.

• Miners 0-25 %
• Researchers 0-50 %
• Construction Workers 0-35 %
• Shipwrights 0-60 %
• Security Guards 0-50 %

I'm suggesting the following few additions so players can "tweak" their planet in more ways (toying around with population should reward players who actually bother).

Stealth 0-25%

Able to gain a higher stealth level by using a part of your population to motivate your agents to do better.

Salvage 0-50%

Get your population to focus on retrieving more salvage during battle, ranging from 0-5% extra salvage. Setting it to 10% will give you 1% extra salvage

Scanning 0-25%

Uses more population to decipher the raw data returned by succeeding with a scan and so reduces the cost of the scan by 0-10%

Experience 0-10%

Torture your people to make sure they gain more experience with everything you are able to gain xp with

[isildurx]

The stealth pop will raise the stealth level and not the alert level surely?

Not sure the salvage and experience populations will work. I think that both of them will have to have some sort of "delay" so you cant just switch on salvage right before you land a def, and off right after, and the same with switching your population onto experience right before landing attacks

Also, I think that salvage should go from 0-50% of pop, where 10% on pop gives you 1% more salvage and 50% gives you 5% more salvage etc.

[Cain]

Changed the salvage explanation, good one.

The thing about delaying is that i don't know how much extra coding this might take. It is better solution ofc to do it that way. As it is now most people will need to sacrifice 1 tick of construction bonus (assuming they wont sacifice mining / research).

[ArcChas]

The stealth setting would have the effect of making cov-ops more effective (stating the obvious but bear with me). Most people don't like cov-ops anyway and most never use it. This change would be utilised by all of the "specialist" cov-oppers and would mean that the rest of us would either have to increase the resources "wasted" on sec centres / guards or to accept being cov-opped on a (more) regular basis.

[isildurx]

If we introduce a time limit to change in population(f.ex once every 24 ticks), then the "salvage population" might introduce an interesting dynamic where an attacker pulls at the last second in order to get the defenders to put their population on "salvage", and being stuck with this for 24 ticks.

[Androme]

vBulletin Message
You must spread some Reputation around before giving it to Cain again.

[Mzyxptlk]

I'm no a huge fan of population in general, to be honest. The settings everyone uses add absolutely nothing and could just be replaced by increasing the normal base. You can get guards at the drop of a hat, you no longer need an alert "buffer" (make guards a bit cheaper to compensate), and the production speed buff is fairly minor in the larger scheme of things. Build a few extra factories and you're done.

As for the new categories you suggest, they're actually worse. You'd set the XP and salvage ones for the tick you land, the scanning one if you're a scanner and the stealth one if you're a cov opper. Truly shocking strategies being developed right here, folks!

Adding a minimum time between allowing people to change population settings helps some, but also makes population even more like governments than it already is. Right now they're merely the same in function (both give bonuses to certain categories). With a mininum duration, they become more similar mechanically as well. Why have 2 versions of the same thing?

Unless population can be turned into something more interesting (something you could develop to provide ever larger bonuses, for instance, rather than just turn on and forget about), I see no real reason to keep it at all.

[TheoDD]

Originally Posted by Mzyxptlk

Unless population can be turned into something more interesting (something you could develop to provide ever larger bonuses, for instance, rather than just turn on and forget about), I see no real reason to keep it at all.

what if you are addicted to seeing that 25% mining population?

[Clouds]

Although I do not concur with all of the OP's suggestions, I do think that we need more diversity in population choices, as we're doing the same thing round after round, and it gets quite repetitive and boring.

This game needs changes such as the suggestions above, otherwise players are just going to eventually get bored and quit.

[NoXiouS]

The population system could really do with an overhaul, as tampering with the pop now is a very minor part of the game (momentarily boosting prod to help cover for example, or boostin alert to drive away a pesky covopper). Basically you set the rates once, and that's it. Giving bonuses to scans (especially prices) wouldn't mean anything really, the scans are already paid by the alliance funds (in most cases) and anyone going covopper should already be able to make a profit out of it rather easily.

The idea of improving your population (through experience in certain area maybe?) sounds tempting and would be awesome to atleast test at some point.

A small and not properly thought of example about "trainable population":
have your pop "learn" mining, research and construction (25%,50%,25%), at tick XX you've earned 5% bonus in mining, 10% bonus in research and 5% bonus in constructions. A scanner could go 100% research at start, have a 20% bonus at tick XX, then change to 100% constructions, and have a 20% bonus at tick XXX (total of 20% to research and 20% to cons that you will keep) and there could be a "College" construction that would give a bonus to the "learning" (much like RC now).

A system like this would give a lot more possibilities to playing with the pop, but could possibly take a little of the "war game" edge away as well.