Short answer: No.

The issue is that production has two inputs: Population & Improvements.

Regardless of whether Population increases at logrithmic, linear or exponential scale, you still have this general issue where one path is inevitably going to be better than the other.

In 2.3, population affected production as the square root of the population. Therefore, population was a waste of time to focus on.

In 2.5, population had a 1 to 1 benefit to production which makes improvements a waste of time to focus on.

The player's goal is to maximize production and do so in a way that has strategic interest and can be communicated to the player in order to provide a counter strategy.

As the player, how do I keep my opponent's economy under control?

In 2.5 you can keep them from getting too many durantium resources which keeps their factory production limited.  But that doesn't stop the player from just having a huge population.

In 2.6, we have two resources to work with: Durantium for improvements and Promethion for population.   It's a lot harder to stop them on both axis's and provides the player a strategic choice.

I really like this concept.  I will have to think about that.

I don't think this would work well.  It boils back down to the commutative property of addition. Whether it's the population or the improvements providing the flat doesn't really matter. 

Fundamentally, the problem is that there are two inputs into increasing production: Population and Improvements.

The problem got exacerbated when we made Population provide 1 raw production in 2.5.  But it was a problem before, it's just that population was basically worthless before.

There are two general solutions to this:

1.  Have production only have 1 input (which I don't think is intuitive and flies in the face of history)

2. Have the 2 inputs have different paths to increasing that forces the player to choose.

Now, I don't think using resources is an ideal way to create a dichotomy.  But I can't think of a better way.  If you use tech as the distinction you are, in effect, just using a derivative to create your positive feedback loop.  At least with resources, the player is making choice A at the expense of choice B (Durantium and Promethion are not commonly captured together by a starbase).

One difference is that population gains you votes in the U.P., which the others don't.

In vanilla it used to be almost the only provider of flat bonusses, which meant you had to balance population against your planetary specialization, which was a good system. In addition you needed it to provide invasion troops. But both of these aspects are not a thing anymore.

But at this point I am not opposed to rethinking it's role entirely either. For example improvements requiring population to function, or ships requiring population to be build. Or pop being tied to rate of generating citizens. Just dumbfiring some random thoughts on this topic.

I like this idea.
A capital provides 5 pop, 5 research 5 wealth, 5 manufacturing etc. because its special.
A  base factory requires 1 pop to get 1 raw production in manufacturing, ditto basic research, wealth etc. They still have a % adjacency bonus.
Hubs don't require pop they just improve efficiency.

If you build a city there is nowhere for the workers to go, so no increase in base production, just unhappy people.

This way you have to have both pop and either manufacturing\ research \ wealth to function efficiently.

Tech Improvements decrease the pop needed so you can build more.

You can still have your mega planets but they will be mainly larger class planets and fewer.

Now there's the start of an idea- tie the citizen production rate to population, so that the choice to populate gives you a better (slightly?) rate of citizen production, and if you follow that path, colonizing potentially affects that by lowering your population.  this is based on population, not growth rate directly.

Hmmm, for synthetics, maybe adjust the citizen production rate by the promethium supply? (i.e. for synthetics it takes promethium to produce citizens at all) Let the rate at which they appear be affected by the supply of promethium on hand.

If I use durantium as the requirement for improvement builds, I don't get the bump in citizens, but I don't need to build farms and can build admin buildings instead if necessary.

I think we should separate the quantitative and qualitative aspects here.

The quantitative aspect is, that right now population is just the superior input by raw numbers. I think numbers can be found, which can get the two inputs reasonably close to each other. This is the aspect I was meaning to tackle and I don't think it can be neglected.

The qualitative aspect is the incomparables of the two inputs. Putting the numbers aside, I think you want factory manufacturing to be primarily limited by durantium and not by building space. Population is currently primarily limited by building space. Many colonies mean more food means more population.

On the other hand population is the jack of all trades, you can't make 'manufacturing population' at the moment. You allways get the three outputs wealth/manufacturing/research. It limits how much you can specialize.

Population is indirectly limited by monsantium and harmony crystals. One avenue of balance could be making it less efficient in the absence of these two but on par or superior when having both (Because the required ratio of city to entertainment/food is reduced).

What do you (or others) think about playing around monsantium and harmony crystals? Meaning finding quantitative numbers such, that population is on par with factories if neither have ressources, but factories are superior to pop if you have durantium and one ressource for population, and in case of having both monsantium and harmony crystals population is superior again?

It's not a good assumption that linking Durantium and Promethium to Factories and Cities will solve the problem of Population being better than Factories. A player with Durantium but no Promethium would fall behind in research. And the player with lots of Prometheon will win. Then the game becomes entirely dependent on RNG, rather than strategy.


Suppose we got rid of the Space Elevator, Computer Core, and Central Bank.
Have a Factory, Laboratory, and Bank, which each give 1 +0.5/Level yields.

Having 1 of each would give you the equivalent of 1 raw production. Yes, this is completely inferior to a  city. However, building 3 adjacent improvements of the same type would yield 6. This is superior to a city, but only in one aspect. This way, a specialized world is in fact specialized, producing more of 1 yield than the other types. This allows cities to be the 'balanced' option without being the 'best' option.

Higher tier improvements could have higher yields, but be balanced by costing resources. For example, Factory improvements would provide 1/2/3/4/5 Construction and cost 0/1/2/3/4 Durantium. Power Plants could provide 25%/50%/75%  and cost 0/5/10 Antimatter. Similarly, Laboratories could provide 1/2/3/4/5 Research and cost 0/1/2/3/4 Thulium and Research Hubs could provide 25%/50%/75%  Research while costing  0/5/10 Promethium. Wealth Improvements don't use resources because they're  bad enougha s it is.

I see the ploblem being one of dificulty in player optimisation, I'd have a system where each building has a pop requirement to run at full efficiency, then rather have different ways to get a planet going you have a system where you need to balance pop with when they can mostly support a new structure (should be percentage bassed) and then ypu have to consider food as a limiting factor to max pop.

TLDR, get rid of cities and have the hub graphics change to represent pop size, then make building output = pop req / pop tot, capping it at 100% output.

This does open up the balance issue of pop req for each building, but it shouldnt be as hard as the current population system.

As for events, I don't think having some EU2/EU3-styled events which trigger based on internal choices would be a bad thing.   These things have been put in 4X games before, Civ 4 in particular had a pretty good system for them, and FFH used them well.  You have someone really familiar with this on your team. 

I wouldn't want SK-style events for the reasons mentioned but random minor political events aren't a bad thing.

In terms of the economy and cities- isn't morale supposed to be the limiter on this? 

I would like this option much better than hard cap.

This is already the case.   Approval is a key determinator of Raw Production:  if you have more population than approval, you start losing Raw Production - i.e. a negative modifier applies as your planet gets unhappy. The opposite also applies - if you have a 100% Approval on a planet, you get a substantial bonus to Raw Production.  So you absolutely do have to manage Approval vs Population. 

The issue right now is twofold:  keeping a moderate amount of people moderately happy with Approval improvements is pretty easy; e.g. a pop 8 planet is quite trivial to keep 75% Approval on, and that still gives you a healthy Raw Production bonus (IIRC +15% or so).  On the opposite side, it's quite hard for the "average" civ to keep a pop 15 planet above 50% unless you have 3+ Approval buildings.

But that doesn't address the primary problem we have here, which is that under the current setup, the best strategy for something like a Quality 10 planet is 2 cities + 4 farms in appropriate configuration, plus 4 Approval buildings, and NOTHING else, and still be close to 75% Approval.  That can get you to a Pop 20 or more planet that's a powerhouse compared against anything else you could do with that those 10 hexes.  To say nothing if you do your Farms offworld, then you're looking at such a planet having 5 cities/5 Approval improvements, a 60% Approval, but close to a 40 population, and get that way before turn 150.

In the check-in, we removed the Promethion requirement for research.  

Two high level solutions come to mind:

1. Get rid of one.
2. Give each path a side-effect.

Strategy emerges when game elements do more than just one thing.