Population production modifiers - Generating a smooth curve

It's supprising that in this game everything else uses formula, why pop production modifiers is handled this way.

SEV, more than a feeling.

I do like the idea of low pop planets not producing anything very quickly. If you couple that with domed colony sizes you can make it so that tiny - med sized domed planets can only produce 10% of what a good breathable atmosphere can produce

SEV, more than a feeling.

It sounds good to have low production on domed planets or with low populations, but not usually very fun in game play terms. I wouldn't go below 50% of the current defaults.

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Space Empires Depot | SE:V Balance Mod

What curve are you trying to achieve?
You could get a curve that is very steep to begin with then trails off later, or slow to start and spikes very sharply, or whatever....
Trying to decide on a formula without a shape is rather difficult.

Why not use ln(pop/1B)+1? The derivative at pop = 1B is the same as the derivative of the pop/1B line and it is pretty close to(albeit a little larger than) the sqaure root function.

Check out the formula for the charge/discharge curve of a capacitor. It gives a nice smooth curve.

I haven't looked at how migration works yet, but if it is moddable by formula, maybe there's some way to factor the population in? Still, you'd expect that if a planet was in range to be colonized, and if it had achieved some minimum "infrastructure" population, you'd have people streaming in to take advantage of all the extra space ("Go West, Young Man...")

If you are interested in making the low end a little less drastic, you could use exp(pop * ln(2) / ln(10)) / 8

this would give 1/8x production at 1M, 1/4x at 10M, 1/2x at 100M, 1x at 1B, 2x at 10B, 4x at 100B, ...

Also, you should consider what a population production curve will do to the AI. It seems difficult to get the AI to pay attention to dumping pop into a colony after it is colonized. Perhaps it is better to make moving population directly prohibitively costly or impossible, and to model a population "push" at the low end through migration. (Huzzah for less micromanagement.... The assumption here is that the starting pop of a colony arrives in the first month by unseen transport, and makes use of all of the materials stored in the colony pod.

I do find this topic revelant, it would fit my mod perfectly. You can adjust the migration in the setting.txt si it won't get into 50%+ range, this might fix the quick fill of the larger worlds. My mod handle population transport a lot better than the stock game, my AI don't suffer as much from slow starting world as the stock AI would...

I already modded it so production start slowly with the few first millions then get better. But i haven't used a formula for this so it's far from efficient...

Mylon wrote:

It sounds like we think alike, both designing interrelated type mods as we are and tweaking with other things, too... I don't exactly use a formula for population production modifiers, but just a bunch of data points that follow two formulas. Took me a while to do that bit and it was generally annoying, but I did it.

One extra thing i did when modding the production was to make the SY and ressource production increase at different rates. For exemple the SY rate control how fast you are building, be it ships, buildings or units. I made this one increase slower than the other so larger worlds produce more ressources but don't build ships too fast. Also the first few millions produce very little SY wise while the ressource production start a bit stronger (this way it can take a while to build the initial buildings on a colony, but if you get one it won't cripple you with maintenance).

I truly wonder if it's possible to replace the whole clunky setting entry with formulas...

The problem of making colonies feed the bigger systems is that it clogs down the AI quite fast, since the AI isn't as good at knowing to not upgrade stuff or build stuff since it will cost too much maintinance. I'm having a go at my AI work on Stock I'm doing to write a far more reactive construction AI that will look ahead and consider maintinance as well as what materials it's short of, not just what the planet is best at, but thats going to take me a little while I suspect.