I hope I start no further dispute


had a look to current populations of homeworlds:
- Sol (pop: 300, growth: 3,5%, with Moon Habitation pop: 475)
- Romulus (pop: 355, growth: 4%), with Moon Habitation pop: 420
- Qo'noS (pop: 305, growth: 3,5%), with Moon Habitation pop: 355
- Cardassia (pop: 305, growth: 3,6%, with Moon Habitation pop: 395)
- Omarion (pop: 250, growth: 5,0%, no moons)

for Romulus I calculated the 355:
(1) Romulus I: volcanic (hostile), small (25 pop.)
(2) Romulus Prime: terran (ideal), large (180 pop.)
(3) Remus: desert (marginal), large (60 pop.)
(4) Romulus IV: oceanic (comfortable), medium (90 pop.)

To be honest, I had no look yet how this is balanced by other parameters like industry output or build costs

what do I see atm (see also Starting Tech Level http://supremacy.square7.ch/wiki/index. ... Tech_Level )
- at Tech Early all races have about 150 pop.
- at Developed all have about 180 pop.
- at Sophisticated about 250 pop. => here it begins to get hard for Dominion...already reached 90% while Romulans can get 10 more labors and with Moon Habitation some further
- at Advanced and Supreme Romulans also have an advantage, Dominion might have an disadvantage. In MP I did, these might have been occured there, because we did MP without Minors so starting home system had big effects.

well:
- maybe Romulus Prime: terran (ideal), large (180 pop.) should be reduced to medium (120 pop.), in total 295 pop.
- for Dominion no change in population is possible without setting a second planet (we all don't want to). Due to there are Vorta and Jem'Hadar they maybe should get 3 or 4 colony ships and 1 or 2 construction ships
- for Federation I don't know whether all the moons are ok (Fed might need that much population). Or just reduce some moon size? http://supremacy.square7.ch/wiki/index. ... Federation

while in botf ship production was dictated by system production and therefore population in supremacy it is driven by dilithium only, population is (almost) irrelevant and needs no balancing

ah...Thanks for the info

sorry lol but I had to say this
also when colonizing for now it really doesn't matter much if it has max population of 500 or just 80 as long it has dilithium

I think I won enough mp games to tell you it IS in fact right now driven by ship production and afaik dilithium.
Of course this doesn't make up the whole game and in later stage it might change, but for now the rest is subordinate.
Research in fact is important to unlock better shipyards and ships with at least speed 2, or special dilithium buildings eventually, but only when you start at early tech and are far enough from next enemy so you have time for it. And even then expansion is the key to improve research.

btw in all games so far I build shipyards and upgraded to fleetyard right away without improving industry or anything on all my colonies and each race I played - the only thing I care is energy to power the shipyards, dilithium and - cause I hate to see ppl starve - some food

Thanks for the info and please everybody shoud keep calm and respect other minds


... of course population has some/many effects, e.g. more production or http://supremacy.square7.ch/wiki/index. ... Population

I think there's also a (wide) difference between SinglePlayer or MP, tiny galaxy or hugh, having time to expand or -I think- only with ship predominance you'll be victorious until other components like Agents will work.

I'm just at the begin of exploring Supremacy and to get know how some things work. Some things I know or think so, but others I didn't found info about, yet. Of course Supremacy is still in development, but this doesn't prevent me from documenting all I currently see including old info in hope that somebody says: Hey, that's old :-)
Wiki: That's my way to find something because on forums with thousands of threads and posts it's much harder to find info.

I removed "pop within moon habitation" out of wiki


PS: now I'll have a look to VS 2013, and whether VS 2008 stills works which I need for compiling another program (but no hope: I'm not a coder). One good way to get info is to have a look into code

true we tend to start on higher tech, but also on lower tech I build a shipyard first
and well I expect next mp game all ppl (specially reg) start gathering dilithium too and adapt my tactics, that'll be a tough game then

Not sure why it's non-sensical? Dilithium *is* one of the requirements to build ships - and it's one of the drives of the game, finding it. But there are others, which you also need, like raw materials and Deuterium. Notice that you can build other stuff to protect your colonies, like OBs, shields and stations (which require a ship). OBs are not working correctly yet, but they'll be eventually; shields have a problem in this latest build, but it'll be fixed. Stations are ok'ish, but still being worked on by Bloodwurm.
Also, and that's why I mentioned the negative credits penalty, building ships left and right will eventually catch up with you, if you haven't developed your empire properly.

I guess it's a question of what type of game experience you want to build.

Having shipyards with multiple slots and with static build outputs means faster ship building capacities. Meaning you need to hunt for resources much faster. But maybe that's what you want because it will force confrontation.

I think the problem now and it's probably what reg wanted to point out, it's that it's the ONLY thing you can do in the game right now. It's your only option. You have no other options to attack/hinder your opponents. No spies to block your enemies from producing. No powerful OBs to protect your colonies (well... they crash the game as you all know ), no real incentive to use diplomacy besides trying to not get attacked and minors are pretty much blend (not adding THAT much and they accept memberships automatically).

It's a good remark, gameplay right now is "near sighted" but that's pretty much because nothing else is working
I'm pretty sure that when stuff gets added, we'll be able to see different strat appear (and we'll be in a better position to address those types of gameplay issues).

Re Reg's remark, all I was saying is that non-sensical is not exactly the word. Going after dilithium is one of the drives of the game. That's the whole point of ships costing dilithium. Systems with dilithium are a prefered target for colonization, and that's intended. I don't think there's any question about that? Same thing can be said for raw materials, and even deuterium. That's what can make such a system competitive with a high pop, no resources system. If resources are not very important in colony selection, then we just have a different problem - the only systems worth colonizing are the high pop ones...

Re the other remarks, all I was saying was that saying the game is only about dilithium doesn't help. The game is not finished yet, and MP games are not all that the game is about. People reading this might think the game is not worth playing, and I don't think that's what we want?

Reg pointed out, and very well, that SP and MP are 2 different beasts. And the shipbuilding issue is an obvious example of that. In the end, both modes have to be playable. MP is obviously a priority while there is no AI, but in the long run SP might be more important.
I posted those suggestions for MP "fixes" exactly to make MP less of a gung-ho type of play. Ship maintenance for example is not yet a limiting factor because there's no downside to having large fleets. But that'll change. We just need to be patient.

Since apparently shipbuild using industry output doesn't work, I think we can go back to discussing other ways to improve this. Issue in the tracker is a good starting point. This has already been discussed in the dev forums some time ago, maybe other people want to chime in too.

VinculumOne mentioned a shipyard being the first build in a system. In Supremacy there are a couple of other factors that contribute to making building a shipyard right away a factor, like new colonies start with PFs of all types (including energy), and with quite a few industry PFs (4 to 6...); also, those starting PFs are of your current tech level, instead of starting from level 1, which at MP starting levels produce a decent output already. These issues were presented for discussion in the same thread as shipyard output mentioned above, not by chance

One other suggestion I'd make for people to think about is making shipyards only buildable in systems with dilithium (we could argue that dilithium is way too unstable to transport). While this is highly controversial I'm sure, it would have a few benefits. Shipyards with multiple docks would make more sense, in gameplay terms. It would make dilithium systems even more of a high valued target (for colonization and assault/conquest; and hence for defense). Even if we go back to shipyards also providing range extension, it'd make space stations more useful/used, since there would be less shipyards / and in specific locations.
Just food for thought though. I have actually implemented this once, some time ago, but probably noone noticed

Most of the suggestions in #96 would also help industry tied shipyards. Another quick fix could also be to still have a max output on shipyards. So with smaller colonies you still get some progression, but a shipyard would never output more than it's max. For me the ideal choice would be manual pop assignment (as explained in #96).

I kind of like your idea of restricting shipyards to systems with Dilithium only (we could make it configurable per shipyard if we want some races/tech to allow to build anywhere), but I'm concerned about aggravating the "race for Dilithium" that Vinculum mentioned at some point. I know that other pieces of the game are missing right now which could provide altrenatives/counters to ship building but still...

I agree that there are too many PFs of all types on new colonies. It should be something like 1 or 2 farms, 1 or 2 industry and depending on the tech level add some energy and possibly lab. But there are just too many. That they start at max tech level isn't so much an issue for me as I feel it makes sense IF their numbers are reduced. We could customize the type and number of PFs per colony ship.

We could also have some form of build tree (a bit like in a RTS game), where you need to build a particular building prior to being able to build another one. Hence, we could enforce having to build several buildings prior to building a shipyard. We could even go further and say that some buildings would prevent other buildings from being built. This would force the player to think twice about going full blown shipyards, because perhaps the research buildings he needs are now unavailable (so in the long run, perhaps this player would have a large fleet, but another player could have a smaller fleet of higher tech, thus crushing the bigger fleet). Although, I'll admit this would mean that more buildings would need to be added to the database.

well I always found it bad to depend on dilithium for shipbuild cause some times you have bad luck and no dilithium around
instead I'd just give systems with dilithium a little ship production boost, while other systems could be predestinated for other tasks as well

I like the idea of being able to manipulate the rate of ship production but agree what directly linking it to industry without any checks or limits is not viable.

Blood's idea of having a roe of population assignment slot open up in the production window of a system for a shipyard is interesting. Here you would have to assign population to the task or there is no ship production. You increase the rate of production in stages as more people work on it. There could be a fixed number of population slots open per shipyard bay you own. There could be a set upper limit here to the rate of ship production. What about saying industry is building the additional shipyard bays in your build queue? It would just be a name change from the upgrade to Shipyard II or III but might sound and look better.

What about lost system population to building and sending away a colony ship, transport or other large ships?

PFs were fixed in the last email I sent you Bloodwurm.

I suggested colony ships costing population to be built some 5 years ago, and it was rejected. Too much micromanagement IIRC, having to remove pop from their labor allocations so that they're available for the ship's construction.
This would act as a minimum pop requirement of sorts. New colonies would not be suitable to building colony ships; if they do build them, their growth will be greatly affected.
Building colony ships in your homesystems would temporarily affect your output, but it would be regained somewhat quickly.