Fwurg

[Mercury]

I have calculated the numbers:

The outpost pricing is as follows:

Outpost: 5000
Outpost + Cluster: 4000
Outpost + Cluster + Cluster: 3000

The maintenance cost is as follows:

Outpost: 10 , 10 , 10 , 10
Outpost + Cluster: 20 , 20 , 20 , 20
Outpost + Cluster + Cluster: 30 , 30 , 30 , 30

Let me know what you think!

[Mercury]

I thought about it carefully and I found that there is no way in which I can justify a "growing" star system which gains additional gas-mass, rock-mass or bio-mass as your colony increases in size. The fact of the matter is that stars don't split into doubles at a moments notice, and planets aren't captured randomly, nor do they grow large ecosystems in a period of weeks without intervention.

A solution where certain parts of the system are "not yet available for settling" doesn't work either as it precludes the construction of systems which are very resource focussed on for example one large planet. Also, it would lead to a lot of messy edge cases where every step has to fit within the limits of certain levels of development for the colony.

As such, I want to make the entire system available right from the get go.

The total cost of a colony is high - so high it might take over a year to work it up to an independent colony. However, I do not think this amount is unrealistic - founding a colony of this size is an enormous endeavour, only available for the largest nations.

Creating a Settlement

1. Scan

First you need to scan for a settlement as specified in the scanning section earlier.

2. Build a system

To create a settlement you should construct a star system. For this you get 50 , 100 , 200 and 5 . Note this is identical to starting a new system. You do NOT get anything beyond these, including free trade fleets, holonet relay stations and constructed zones.

Post the system on the wiki as a normal system.

3. Get approval

Your system needs to be approved as any other system. Please post it on the System and Character Building forum for approval.

4. Pay to open your colony

Settling a new system is an expensive endeavour. Creating the conditions for the initial settlement costs 10.000 which needs to be paid. Congratulations, you now have a Class I Colony.

Your colony requires maintenance:

• 25 , 25 , 25 , 25

5. Start building zones

Once you have made your initial investment, you can start to build zones. Because of the distance and the limited access to proper construction equipment on a new world, each zone has an increased cost of 1000 . This means a zone costs 3.000 , or 1.500 on a world with Natural Life.

You can build up to 7 zones in your system before you need to upgrade. The system supports up to one trade fleet for free.

6. Upgrade your colony

Once you have seven zones, you can upgrade your colony to a class II colony. The cost of this upgrade is 5.000 and allows you to build 7 new zones (14 total in the system) as well as supporting a second trade fleet for free.

In order to upgrade your colony needs to meet the following criteria:

• Have at least 7 zones
• Have a trade fleet with a capacity of at least 200

The maintenance changes to:

• 25 , 25 , 25 (:exotic matter devices), 25

7. Upgrade your colony again

Once you have fourteen zones, you can upgrade your colony again to a class III colony. The cost of this upgrade is 5.000 and allows you to build another 7 new zones (21 total in the system) as well as free support for a single holonet relay station in the sector.

In order to upgrade your colony needs to meet the following criteria:

• Have at least 14 zones
• Have two trade fleets with a capacity of at least 200 each
• Have a population of 1.0 or more in the system

The maintenance changes to:

• 25 , 25 , 25 , 25

8. Free your colony

Once you have 21 zones, you can free your colony, making it a fully independent system. Upon completion of a payment of 5.000 , your colony becomes a fully separate system that is completely self-sufficient.

In order to be freed your colony needs to meet the following criteria:

• Have at least 21 zones
• Have a total population of 2.0 or more in the system
• Have at least three trade fleets with a capacity of at least 200 each
• Have a holonet relay station in the sector with a capacity of at least 500

You no longer have to pay any maintenance.

---

Issues to resolve:

• Balance between new organic worlds and terraformation technology
• Building population

I'm curious to hear everyone view.

[Chriz]

Roughly 70 000 tax for 21 zones... Not calculating upkeep and moving population... Yes it is possible in 1 year, but you can not do anything else in this year...

Can you create population with that 200 bio?

Still i don't see why you can not create a system with 30 , 50 , 100 and 2 .
This can still be large enough for a good independent settlement and would more likely be affordable.

[Mercury]

The population question is still open. I want to say yes, but looking for a reason why.

One of the things about building a system with lower amounts of resources is that it throws off the balance between stars, gas giants and planets and moons. It would mean several types of star are unavailable. It would also mean there was less rock mass to make planets, meaning Gas Giants and Main Sequence Stars will be much less desirable as their orbits are useless. The system just isn't balanced for widely varying amounts of spendable resources.

[Brend]

I really like the direction you took with this, it seems to be a good balance between slow upgrades (we're talking about a complete system after all) and immediate reward (not in the economic sense, but in the 'Booyeah, I've got a colony' sense) without having to wait for a gazillion turns.


I'll look into this better in the weekend, but some first (probably biased) thoughts:

'Building' population should not be possible without some serious tech investment, and comes with some serious strings attached.

First a rule-related problem: a system can support at most 1.0 per zone. Since the new colony does not have any zones, it can not support any population. Unless this rule is relaxed, or changed to accommodate new colonies, no population can be bought with the available .

(Warning, the next section is deliberately gaming the system)

Second: not only is it just weird to spawn new population over there, depending on how the population migration tech is designed it might become viable to just get the cheapest system possible, throw in as many as you can and transfer them out to your normal system. Then you just stop paying the upkeep -- this will probably destroy your whole colony; but you get roughly 31.0 !

You do this with a binary red+red a 8 , 1 medium planet, 1 small planet, 2 medium moons a 32 . This converts 42 to , converts 110 to , and then buys 310 worth of .

The above system ignores the developed zone rule mentioned above. I also ignored the specials -- personally I would go for five Augmented Species with a three of them netting me a 30% population, and two of them giving me 2 extra racial characteristics. That's 9.3 with 5 characteristics! Sure, you would have to pay a load of population growth cost, but those can be mitigated by a double High Fecundity -- beat that with an augmentation zone...

[Mercury]

Regarding population: at this time I want to simply not offer the option of buying population - with that, I also want to offer the option of developing technology to acquire population, though this will come with requirements and costs, in founding a settlement. For now that should resolve the issue and allow us to finalise the colonization rules.

Additionally, I have finished the development of the Colonization Technologies:

Standard Template Construction
By strict standardisation of the correct components, standard templates can take away many of the difficulty of design and construction while allowing additional economy of scale.

Effect: Construction Materials Augmentation Zones may now be upgraded for the usual cost of upgrading a zone (1000 or 500 with Natural Life). An upgraded Construction Materials Augmentation Zone provides a production bonus of +25 rather than +15 to each Construction Materials Zone
Cost: 500 / 5

SPECIAL NOTE: All participants in the Colonization and Galactic Survey & Scanning Techniques Summit get the Standard Template Construction technology for free.

Sensor Vessels
This technology expands survey fleets with small sensor vessels, which can be sent out to many locations to do scans and extend the network of the fleet, increasing the efficiency and speed at which scans are done.

Requires Standard Template Construction

Effect: The base scan time of all scans is reduced by one .
Cost: 3750 / 5

Prefabrication
Through pre-fabrication and efficient shipping, many components of the colony can be pre-built in an environment where construction is more efficient, thus reducing total cost.

Requires Standard Template Construction

Effect: 10% cost cut on initial cost to set up a colony
Cost: 4000 / 4

Population Mobility
By extending life support systems and combining them with stasis pods, it becomes easier to carry colonists with the first ships flying towards a colony.

Requires Standard Template Construction

Effect: When the colony is founded you may move 0.5 from your home system to the colony free of charge.
Cost: 5000 / 6

Network Centric Colonization
Setting up the colony as a network rather than a single large colony allows the colony to be upgraded more efficiently units added fluently rather than running into limitations of scale.

Requires Standard Template Construction

Effect: 10% cost cut on the cost to upgrade a colony
Cost: 4000 / 4


Opinions and suggestions welcome!

[Freekjan]

Most of what is posted seems good, but there are a few points I think should be addressed:

I think Population Mobility should not be a colonization tech (only): If it is possible to move a significant amount of to a far away galaxy, where life support systems are probably not set up yet, I find it weird that it's impossible to move any amount of even to the next planet over.

Next, with the technologies mentioned so far I would not consider the population issue resolved. Even if we research to put population on a colony and then put them on a planet with a good atmosphere it would still take 500 before it is even possible to upgrade to free your colony. While I don't mind it taking long (based on Chriz' analysis roughly 2 years irl. feels reasonable), I think that if something will not happen in the coming 10 years, making rulings for them is a bit premature.

System creation was originally balanced with buying for in mind, wont just dropping this option make systems over-abundant?

[Mercury]

There are rules under construction for moving population - they are long overdue ^_^ Once they are there, it will be easier to move population and thus reduce the time necessary for the population to grow to 2.0 . Or did I miss something else?

I agree that because you are less likely to buy populations in your settlement since you need techs and meet additional conditions and cost which aren't defined yet. Thus your new system will have more abundant atmospheres and oceans.

However, I also don't see a lot of colonies popping up any time soon. The initial investment of 16.000 , not including technologies, just to set up a base colony which produces nothing is quite high in both actual tax and in opportunity cost. I don't think the little extra abundance of will break it.

I'm open to suggestions on improving this proposal though, so please do not hesitate!

[Chriz]

FreekJan has a valid point here, i was thinking this myself. The population mobility tech is actually useless without other population moving technologies. Moving 0.5 population does not give you any benefit. The other technologies are looking good i think.

[Brend]

Most technologies seem fine, they give reasonable boosts or cuts.

I do have some significant problems with Population Mobility. As it is written now it is basically a penalty to use it. You transfer 0.5 , which is not only not giving you a production bonus on their new place of residence, you actually lose 0.5 on the original location. This will mean (for most players) that they'll have to wait for a rather long time before they have recuperated from this population hit.

Most players have too little population to send even 0.5 of them away: it will either destroy their growth, or it will reduce their left-over population below a billion line, which directly impacts their economy. Because if this I judged the actual interest in moving population to colonies to be practically zero.

With that in mind, I was not aiming for a technology that restricted the moving of population to colonization actions. I was trying for something that would be usable for people even if they have no interest in colonization. My idea was to have some kind of tech that allowed the transfer of population from planet A to planet B, for an amount / .

Of course, this will also hurt their growth, and impact their economy; but they can continue the transfer until the've transferred at least 1.0 . This gives them the option of boosting other planets in their main system, should they wish to do so.

As the tech is now, a transfer of 0.1 costs around 1000 ; as you'll most likely not use the technology twice, with colonies being as pricey as they are. So any rules we come up with will be around the same (maybe taking into account population growth cost?)... Would it be a interesting to change the population mobility tech to offer a reduction on the price of population moves overall, instead of only during colonization actions?

Side note A: I think that population transfers within the same system should cost significantly less than transfers between systems.

Side note B: Do we need rules for population moving? I think a tech will suffice. I see it as an acquired skill, as it involves uprooting hundreds of millions of people -- this is not something that comes naturally. Such a process would be greatly helped by technological assistance of some form.

[Freekjan]

As the tech is now, a transfer of 0.1 costs around 1000 ; as you'll most likely not use the technology twice, with colonies being as pricey as they are.

This is quite untrue. The tech states nowhere that you can't share its research. And a similar argument can be held against each of the other technologies mentioned, yet those seem designed to break even at ~4 colonies per time researched. This suggests the tech evaluates the value of moving 0.1 at 250 .

[Brend]

I stand corrected.

[Mercury]

Freekjan has the right idea around the scale. I'll do some calculations on moving population and such things when I get back from my trip and make a post then

[Chriz]

Brend and I looked at the costs for moving population in general.

Here are the factors that we had to take into account:

• Amount of Population.
• Distance
• Population growth cost
• Racial Characteristics: Natural flight, Tiny, High fecundity

Amount of Population
We think the amount of population on the source and target planet is irrelevant, since you move and pay a fixed unit of population. 0.1 / seems like a reasonable rate.

Distance
We think that population transfer within a system should be more affordable then population transfers between systems.

Population Growth Cost and relevant Racial Characteristics
We assume that PGC must be paid. Because even though the total production bonus of your population does not increase through a transfer, the benefits of construction affecting racial characteristics must be balanced. Besides the extra population requires extra infrastructure.

Given that the PGC must be paid the following factors have no influence on the final cost of population movement. Because the PGC balances them out due that the fact that it factors in the different sizes of planets and the required infrastructure.

The bonus from Natural Flight is countered by the PGC.

The reduction on PGC offered by High Fecundity is of no consequence. Even in combination with Natural Flight it is not profitable to move population for the Natural Flight reduction on zone construction cost. (The PGC reduction by High Fedudity is only applicable on Type I atmosphere + Ocean planets on which the Natural Flight cost reduction is halved.)

If 1.0 with the Tiny characteristic leaves a planet, the extra zone this population provided is destroyed.

Cost proposal
Because the PGC is used to balance construction related bonuses (such as racial characteristics) the actual price of a population transfer can be relatively low.

As 250 per 0.1 / of the Population Mobility tech should offer a cost reduction with respect to the normal price (we ignore the time reduction of the tech because the construction of zones on the colony takes multiple turns anyway).

Therefore we propose a price of:

• 150 per 0.1 / for transfers within the system,
• 300 per 0.1 / for transfers between systems.

Whether this is implemented as rule or technology is irrelevant for the determination of the price. (Since moving population on this scale is something special, a technology (of around 1000 / 5 ) would be more logical than a rule, in the authors opinion.)

[Gerben]

I like the finalized idea's and Techs so far. I'll reserve judgement over the population tech, since its already under review.

Once the rules and tech are finalized, ill draw up an event to finish the summit on Glasslyn, since it seems there is no need of joined introductional research into this field.