One thing that really bothered me with Masters of Orion 2 is how population is handled. On a given planet, as far as I know, as soon as the population cap is reached, the population just stops growing, and there's no penalty. If something like that happened in real life, of course, you'd have starvation and overcrowding and general unhappiness.

Of course, this is a game, so following the laws of reality isn't exactly required. But I think that in this case, an interest opportunity was missed.

Why do you expand your empire in MoO2? Having more planets allows you to do more production and research, for one thing. It also allows you to increase your population to have more sway in the United Planets, or whatever it was called. Being big makes you a less interesting target for other empires. Border worlds provide a buffer zone between your core, important planets and anyone that might want to attack.

But what internal pressure is there to expand? Not a lot. You expand because it's an empire builder and that's what you do in an empire builder.

I think something more interesting could be done with this.

Let's go back to what I said about population for a second. Let's change the population cap from a hard limit to the maximum number of people your planet could actually support -- not how many it could actually hold. So, for instance, if a planet in your empire could support 100 people comfortably, the population can grow past that a little, but people aren't going to be very happy. After awhile you'll start getting starvation, and people are going to be very happy. Soon, you'll have a rebellion to deal with, and if it goes unchecked, your whole empire will start falling apart.

How do you mitigate this population increase? Explore, colonize new planets, and spread your population around so that everyone has space. Of course, there ARE other races, so you can only expand so far before you run into problems.

I think most 4x/empire builder games would benefit from more concrete internal expansion pressures like that. I think these games are always more interest when your threats aren't limited to the external ones, partially because it makes peacetime gameplay more interesting and partially because it makes everything more organic and flow-ier. I think these kinds of things also force the player to act instead of just letting their empire get fairly stable with a decent lead and then riding out the rest of the game like that.

I'm also taking some of these ideas from SimCity by the way. In that game, if you don't make money, you lose, and you need a population to make money. So, more people leads to a steadier income. However, as you get more people, you also need to provide for costlier amenities like police protection and sewers.

Anyway, what are your thoughts on this? Can you think of other strategy games that implement a mechanic like this?

One book I would recomend to anyone looking at 4X games is that of Jarad Diamond's "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed" ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse:_How_Societies_Choose_to_Fail_or_Succeed ). It talks about how societies function and how the decisions and events that occur to them can cuase them to remain stable or fall.

One common event that crops up is that of overpopulation and how it occurs. Basically, environments fluctuate. Some time there is a lot of food, and otherse there is only a small amount of food available.

In time of plenty, the population expands, but then when food is scarce, this extra population doesn't have the resoures to support it and famin results.

If you allow planets to have varying environments (sometimes they are good and some time they are bad), the player will allow their populations to expand during good times, but then when the bad times occur, they will have to deal with an overpopulation problem.

You would then give the player tools to adjust the amount of population growth allowed, but the more controled the growth, the less the population will like them (more chance of rebellion), but also have it that during famin time the population will also not like the player increasing the chance of rebellion.

Lastly, give the player the ability to move resources between planets so the player could create colonies that provide extra resources to high population planets when the colony is producing more than it typically does. It gives a reason for expansion as stability as well as dealing with over population.

I think you'll find that some games do include this mechanic, to some degree.

The Civilization series is one example, though it has become less so in recent iterations. When Civ first came out, populations would grow above and beyond what the food income could support, and one would have to build settlers (which would reduce a city's population by 2, each) or caravans/workers for infrastructure (which would reduce by 1, each).

Later iterations, populations could only grow one or two points above what the city could support, maximized at what a settler/worker would subtract. Then they made it so that a city would only grow to what the food could support, but if you lost control of a tile that provided food, the city would go into starvation until you reclaimed it, or reduced your population (but they removed the pop cost of settlers/workers). Guess we'll find out tomorrow how they've dealt with it this time :-P

Other games, like Galactic Civilizations, only increase pop in a city/planet/system when it is told to do so, which most people never find out because they don't play the tutorials. So, they continue over producing until they build a colony ship that subtracts from planetary pop, and sends it elsewhere exactly as you describe.

Still more take the easy way out, and only increase pop based on the buildings constructed to support them, but check this against buildings built to supply food. So its basically your own damn fault if you don't support your pop by first building food supplies.

I like Edtharan's idea here, but it defies realism, which seems to be something you are struggling to achieve. How do you *stop* people from having children? You can of course prevent immigration, but enforced birth control will cause rebellion in and of itself (which, I suppose could also be an interesting mechanic to manage). The best solution I can see is to avoid the micromanagement as a whole, allow populations to grow in excess of food production, and create a mechanic to allow for populations to migrate between cities where food can support the population. Aside from that, its darwinism, and the effort you are willing to put forth to support frisky pops. Overcrowding is a fact of life, and if you've got it in your city/planet/system, such is the way of things, and best of luck dealing with stupid people like every other government official.

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Original post by egrathwohl I like Edtharan's idea here, but it defies realism

I find this comment interesting as the system I described is actually based on studies of real world civilizations. In the real world environments fluctuate, some years are good some years are bad. In good years populations increase and in bad years starvation causes them to decrease.

When populations are under stress (from starvation, etc) they are more likely to rebel or try to replace the curent leaders (in a democracy elections are essentially a planed, periodic coup to replace the leaders).

Also, if populations are forced to act against their desiers (eg: increasing population in good times) then they will not be all that happy. Just try to imagine how an election would go if one side had a policy (during a time of plenty) to force a population limit and say who could or could not have children. Thye would never get elected (or would be elected out of office).

However, just after a time of scarcity, a population would probably welcome such a policy, so you could create a mechanic that would encourage players to make policies that would have reduced or prevented some desaster (which is also what occurs in real politics too).

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How do you *stop* people from having children? You can of course prevent immigration, but enforced birth control will cause rebellion in and of itself (which, I suppose could also be an interesting mechanic to manage). The best solution I can see is to avoid the micromanagement as a whole, allow populations to grow in excess of food production, and create a mechanic to allow for populations to migrate between cities where food can support the population. Aside from that, its darwinism, and the effort you are willing to put forth to support frisky pops. Overcrowding is a fact of life, and if you've got it in your city/planet/system, such is the way of things, and best of luck dealing with stupid people like every other government official.

I think a policy mechanic is a good way to handle it. Policies can be put in place by the player to handle these decisions.

I came up with an idea for a contracting system for games that allowed the game to understand the terms in a contract and act on them. The idea was to create a list of terms, and with each term being a programatic object instanted in that list. Each of these items would have a set of parameters and the code necesary to allow the game to understand what it had to do with it.

Using a similar system the player could set out policies (a contract) for their worlds to follow. It could be set up on a planetary basis and/or as an empire wide basis.

If you look at it, each action a player does can be seen this way, just that each action the player does occurs in real time rather than as a predefined list. Viewed like this a contracting system really only needs a way to allow the player to store these actions in the list and to detect when the player would want to do them.

You could incorporate social polices as means of creating internal pressure to expand or for population to travel to new colonies.

For instance a generous land allowance policy means citizens land owners get a lot of initial land making them happy and productive, but as the population increase the available land drops quickly until you have a lot landless citizens creating a pressure for new colonies so that they can gain land of their own.

Likewise high unemployment has always been a migration factor. Perhaps upgrading your factories from Mark I to Mark II doubles your planets industrial output but puts 25% of the population employed in the industrial sector out of work.

You could also think about allowing civilian migration and colonization. Rather having to build every colony ship your people might build some themselves. The player could help by sponsoring civilian projects.

Then again I’ve always thought that in a 4x game it would be far more interesting if only a civilization’s home world had a really high population and colonies were rarely larger then a few thousand people. Thus making home worlds of far more strategic importance.