Fwurg

[Mercury]

The Fundamental Genetics Research has been completed! I gave the technology an ability beyond allowing access to other techs - this is a lucky side effect of the technological breakthrough.

On the Wiki, I have listed four new technologies which are population / species related.

Currently, races have highly specific bonuses which limits you to certain strategies. That was never a problem before since once you had a population it didn't change. Now that populations grow and you must pay for that (to avoid the free-lunch problem), cost have to be calculated for the optimum making sub-optimal choices prohibitively expensive and limiting the appeal of making a sub-optimal race for RP reasons.

To solve this problem, I am considering an overhaul. However, before I go there, I want to hear the opinion of others.

The direction I am currently thinking in is to make races less focussed on a single product as they are now, but to give more general bonuses, thus giving more tactical freedom to players.

For example, one Characteristic might give a bonus to all Metal activities (including mining metals, producing vehicles, consumer products and construction materials) while another might give a (lower) general production bonus to everything. This allows a bit more freedom and doesn't bind you to a specific specialisation.

If an overhaul is done, I also intend to integrate this with the Jedi System, with specific racial powers for Jedi being linked to the associated race. Naturally you would still be able to customise some of the racial characteristics of your Jedi regardless, but I feel things like Natural Flight and Aquatic should be taken into account with your Jedi.

Opinions?

[Veolian Commonwealth]

I'm in favour of an overhaul, and would really like to see population be something more than just another factor to min-max. To this end, having more generic bonuses would help, since it wouldn't be necessary to focus on a single product. Currently it's a bit weird that the overall population would be very proficient in the extraction of , but wouldn't know how to process this into , or .

A coupling between racial bonuses and the Jedi system is a good idea -- to me it seems clear that a Jedi from a winged race should have wings.

As a note: I would like to make sure that the racial characteristics aren't going to be just economic things. I really like my race's High Fecundity characteristic -- I even took it before we measured any population growth, it's just how they work. The same goes for things like the Combat Ability characteristic, and some other characteristics that I can foresee coming up at a later time (having to do with fleets, and other factors of the game).

[Praetorian Empire]

I think that the population should allow for both strategies. Single target focus or a general bonus. I like the idea mentioned by Brend. In that case you would not have to chose a product focus anymore since they are always included in the raw material focus. I am not a fan of the completely generic bonus, you have atmospheres for that.

I vote for removing the product focus and include the products in the raw materials.

[Veolian Commonwealth]

To give credit where credit is due: the idea of folding materials and products into a single bonus was originally mentioned by admin.

I'm a proponent of a generic bonus. Having a lot of population has some impact on how much workforce you have, which in turn influences the efficiency of ALL economic processes. But the less generic bonuses should be stronger to compensate for the fact that they apply to less fields of an economy.

I would really like to hear from the other players as well!

[Fred]

I think it is reasonable to say that if you can harvest a specific raw material you should be able to process it. Doesn't this mess up the balance with other racial specials?
Can you still take three times the same raw material special?
If you can you will still get the completely specialized planets as in the current system.
In the case that you can not stack these bonuses there are probably more different specials needed.

In my case i do not see my races with:
Flight, population growth or combat ability.
(No wings, no special growth and they are more likely to be naturally weak then strong)

Of course you can take two or three different raw material focuses but that is not really a solution...

There should probably be some different branches in specials, i am not sure what yet.

[Praetorian Empire]

I agree that there should be more different racial bonuses. There are two other categories that i can think of that are not created yet.
Combat system related features, such as fleet upkeep or offensive bonuses.
Trade bonuses, not sure how to define those.

[Mercury]

The idea was indeed to make the resource specialisation not stackable. That is, you could get the +5 on vehicles from being specialised in metal and the +5 on vehicles from being specialised in gas, but you couldn't get a +20 bonus in construction materials because you cannot specialise in metals twice. That'd also mean you can get a maximum of +10 on any resource (which means I can lower the population growth cost too).

I am already working on additional racial abilities to go with this, some of which you'll probably find interesting - I'm looking to nature for inspiration and I've already got several neat idea's. Currently working them out and I'll have more on this soon! Thanks for all the idea's so far btw!

[Sundarian Federation]

I like the new direction for the revisement of the rules concerning population growth and effects, with the current rules population is a factor, but since the growth is negligible, the investments made in population are secondary.

With this rule change, including the new ideas for racials, i think population and the benefits, becomes more important, since the growth is now increased, expansion is no longer free, and the suggested changes to the racial boni are broader and thus increase the impact population has.

I also like the suggestion for more, different racial boni, such as the ones mentioned by Chris, and i support the development to move away from single product boni to the wider, raw material bonus types since they are more in line with a logical development of a race.