Talvieno wrote:
This is a huge difference, and it's not purely aesthetic. It's more immersive, too. Mr. Parnell aims to make the universe feel alive, and nothing feels more alive than showing that people are actually living peaceful lives in your universe.

The last two dev videos certainly made the universe felt alive to me.

Flatfingers wrote: Everything takes time when you're building a game. The value of implementing civilians has to weighed against the cost to do that.

These comments are intended to place an additional weight on the "value" side of the scales.

I still don't think it has enough value to justify delaying the game a massive amount of time or to justify the cause any notable performance hit.

I still don't feel convinced that these civilians would be different enough from the regular AI's to justify it. Going to a system and seeing that it is full of mining and trading factions is a good sign the system is safe. If you end up in a system full of pirates, well, it may not. So instead of seeing Acme Mining Guild, we see Bob's People Ferry. The only difference would be that Bob's People Ferry would be less flexible and could only do one thing. The rest of the AI would be more adaptive.

Now I know the proposed idea would make them somewhat different, by having an effect on a new proposed morale system, which also will take time to add and balance.

Again, the idea is not totally bad. In a perfect world or early in the development cycle I could see it as a possibility. I just see it as putting another layer on already high multi layer cake. Perhaps when Josh gives us more information on just how planets work we can figure out if something like this will even work.

Perhaps Poet could put up a poll.

Civilians? Y/N?


And honestly, the way I proposed it, adding civilians wouldn't take more than a day or two at most, and would be self-balancing for the most part, with little performance hit.



Edit: Better than a poll: Perhaps Mr. Parnell could tell us his thoughts on the matter. *crosses fingers*

having planets and stations offer up civilians as a mission sounds like a really interesting idea, but i really like the refugee idea too. i was just assuming there would be escort missions, like take this exec to this location. or even escorting an explorer/scientiest to an anomoly. the act of "escorting" them could be just a commodity in your hold, or more like following another ship protecting them. i think it adds plenty to the world of LT.

Talvieno wrote:Perhaps Poet could put up a poll.

Civilians? Y/N?


And honestly, the way I proposed it, adding civilians wouldn't take more than a day or two at most, and would be self-balancing for the most part, with little performance hit.



Edit: Better than a poll: Perhaps Mr. Parnell could tell us his thoughts on the matter. *crosses fingers*

Poll is up. Can't hurt.

Jacobi1981 wrote:having planets and stations offer up civilians as a mission sounds like a really interesting idea, but i really like the refugee idea too. i was just assuming there would be escort missions, like take this exec to this location. or even escorting an explorer/scientiest to an anomoly. the act of "escorting" them could be just a commodity in your hold, or more like following another ship protecting them. i think it adds plenty to the world of LT.

Heh. Starpoint Gemini 2 has something similar to this. Last time I played (beta) these missions weren't time sensitive, so I spent most of my playthrough tooling around the galaxy with an electronica duo who wear distinctive helmets and whose name was uncannily similar to, but not quite, Daft Punk tucked away somewhere on my ship. I like to think they were there collecting material for a concept album.
It certainly added a lot of character to an otherwise dull cargo run.

Also an enthusiastic +1 to the importance of civilians as an indicator species.

Poet1960 wrote:Poll is up. Can't hurt.

I meant in this thread, but that works too, I suppose.

Talvieno wrote:

Poet1960 wrote:Poll is up. Can't hurt.

I meant in this thread, but that works too, I suppose.

I wasn't sure I could at first, then I wasn't sure if it would be better in the poll section, so I just decided to take the safer route.

Ahhhh, all right. Well, I quoted some of the more "landmark" posts over there - hopefully I got enough to provide some context.

What useful civilians do? How do they get their money? I could understand planets as means for generating more population - and thus forcing colonisation and terraforming in terms of expansion - but population itself should have meaning. How could you allow civilians to become something more in a procedural universe? How such promotion (let's say, for equipping an entire fleet for interplanetary conflict) would look like? Do civilians use resources in order to "stay alive"?

That's a lot of questions, but also a lot of potential for meaningful gameplay.

Safe-r wrote:What useful civilians do?

• Showing you whether a system is safe
• Adding planetary evacuation gameplay - when the planet is attacked, the entire civilian population evacuates the planet almost all at once
• Adding siege gameplay - cutting off civilian trade for long enough causes morale to drop, and eventually civilians will revolt and start leaving on their own, if you can't break through whatever siege is there
• Adding civilian escort missions
• Assisting you in colonizing other worlds by becoming civilian "resources"
• They provide targets for privacy - while some civilian ships would carry civilians as ferries or cruise ships, others would transport planet-made goods between planets.

Safe-r wrote: How do they get their money?

By resources you and others bring to their planet. The same way as how everyone gets their money - trade. (Piracy aside.)

Safe-r wrote:I could understand planets as means for generating more population - and thus forcing colonisation and terraforming in terms of expansion - but population itself should have meaning.

Population, by the current popular model in this thread:

• Increases civilian traffic
• Increases planetary production output
• Causes planets to demand more resources
• Higher population causes planetary morale to drop more quickly, making large planets require more "maintenance" in the form of civilian traffic
• Makes the planet harder to wipe out via orbital bombing
• Makes colonization of a nearby world easier by becoming a source of migratory civilians
• Larger populations expand more quickly, and can more quickly refill their numbers

Safe-r wrote:How could you allow civilians to become something more in a procedural universe?

I'm assuming you mean "How can civilians help the universe evolve procedurally", or "How can you make civilian populations different per faction/territory/civilization/race".

How civilians can help the universe evolve procedurally:

• Civilians generate traffic, and high traffic in an area increases the chances that trade lanes are creating, making trade lanes directly between planets more likely.
• Attacking enough civilians on a particular route causes civilians to either stop using that route, or send more escort ships
• Attacking enough civilians in general causes the planets involved to lose morale, lower production (which can cripple a smaller faction), and eventually revolt.
• Civilian populations that are well-supplied are wealthier, with bigger, more powerful ships that are capable of withstanding more powerful pirate/military attacks.
• By the default model, everything should balance out naturally. By hindering or helping their progress, you are helping that civilization evolve in different ways, no matter how small the change. Attacking could change a variety of things, such as ship design, escort ratio, routes they choose, planetary morale, civilian migration etc. Aiding could increase trade strength, raise planetary morale, increase planetary population, aid production, and perhaps even cause civilians to migrate to your planet from other locations.

How you can make civilian populations different:

• Via ship modeling algorithms. By combining portions of algorithms per universal area, race (if applicable), system, planet, and faction, you can create differing ship models designed specifically for that particular area. A combination of these produces something unique, yet familiar, if you are familiar with that particular area's ships.
• Changing the rate at which morale lowers per race/system/universal area. Some civilians might not experience such rapid mood changes, while others might be finicky and grow unhappy more easily. The former would require less resources and send out fewer ships, while the latter would demand a larger amount of resources, and grow quickly.
• Changing the default civilian ship/civilian escort ratio per population. Some populations could guard their civilians fiercely, while others, blissfully unaware of the dangers of piracy, could simply send their cruise ships around en masse.
• Changing the shields/armor/weapons/thrust/transport capacity, etc. ratios per civilian ships. Some populations could focus more on making speedy civilian ships, while others could focus more on carrying as many civilians as possible.

Safe-r wrote:How such promotion (let's say, for equipping an entire fleet for interplanetary conflict) would look like?

They're civilians - they leave large-scale conflicts to factions. I suppose they wouldn't be allowed to trade with planets belonging to an enemy faction, but they simply wouldn't travel there anymore.

Safe-r wrote:Do civilians use resources in order to "stay alive"?

Planets in Limit Theory already demand resources. Civilians do nothing except give these demanded resources meaning. The only maintenance civilians require is allowing them to travel between stations and other planets, which keeps their morale high. They don't require any actual resources, besides what the planet itself naturally demands.

Safe-r wrote:That's a lot of questions, but also a lot of potential for meaningful gameplay.

Yes it is, but I think I answered everything. There is definitely a ton of potential gameplay. The best part is, only one or two new mechanics need to be implemented, and everything else would develop completely by itself.

Talvieno wrote:Lots of interesting stuff.

Nice post, Talvieno.

Wow Talvieno, you certainly have a single minded obsession with this whole civilian thing.

I still don't feel it would add a bunch to justify. Perhaps afterwards, even as a mod?

Again, to me the regular AI fills the role as "civilians". We already will have groups of AI who will try to avoid combat and be miners and merchants. If we see a system is full of these types of factions we have a clue that it may be safe.

Again, we are working under a ship per area cap, we have yet to see Josh play with collision detection off for a reason. Civilians would eat away at this cap.

I don't think you realize the amount of effort your complete idea would take to add. It's a major change to the current gameplay as we know it. The civilians themselves are the easier part. (They would just be regular AI with a specific type of ships and personality traits with shackled ability) It's all the sub ideas that would need to be added to make your idea even worth while that would take time to add and balance, and to continue to balance afterwards when other things are added and tweaked.

Zanteogo wrote:Wow Talvieno, you certainly have a single minded obsession with this whole civilian thing.

That first line seemed a bit toxic, but I'll ignore it...

Civilians would eat away at this cap.

I'm suggesting a very small percentage of the cap be directed towards civilians, not a large one. I doubt you'd be able to tell that any leaves were missing from a tree, if a few dozen of them disappeared. This goes along the same lines - except it would be far, far less than a few dozen, perhaps closer to 15 at most, for large planets. With a cap at 500, this is less than 5% of the total ship count. You wouldn't notice they were missing.

Again, to me the regular AI fills the role as "civilians". We already will have groups of AI who will try to avoid combat and be miners and merchants. If we see a system is full of these types of factions we have a clue that it may be safe.

Not really. Mining is the backbone of economy. There will always be miners - they'll just be paid more for their goods, making it more valuable. That's not something you can tell from a simple sweep of the system.

I don't think you realize the amount of effort your complete idea would take to add. It's a major change to the current gameplay as we know it. The civilians themselves are the easier part. (They would just be regular AI with a specific type of ships and personality traits with shackled ability) It's all the sub ideas that would need to be added to make your idea even worth while that would take time to add and balance, and to continue to balance afterwards when other things are added and tweaked.

Implemented as we suggest, it balances itself. All the balancing it needs is to ensure that unhindered traffic keeps the morale at maximum. This is easily done by adjusting either the rate of civilians, or the amount civilians raise morale.

1. Add mechanic to convert planetary resources to ships, designating enough ships as "evacuation ships" so the entire population can be transported if necessary. Divide ship types between "transport" and "escort".
2. Add "morale" value to planets. Set value to decay over time, weighted by planetary population size. Larger planets therefore require more civilian trips to stay happy.
3. Set civilian ships to travel between planets/stations. (i.e. give them missions, based on the current system) Set completed missions to raise morale. Weight mission destination by population and past success per destination. Escort ships are assigned automatically via the same system the rest of the game uses. With this value being #2's equal, everything balances by itself.
4. Set low morale to cause planetary production to drop. This is merely an incentive to keep your people happy, and isn't strictly necessary.
5. Set lower morale to cause civilians to start leaving slowly via evacuation ships, starting with rare, sporadic migrations at high morale, with more leaving the further morale drops. (i.e. give them one-way transport missions, weighted towards planets with higher morale and lower population.) Naturally, this will cause these planets morale to drop, and eventually small numbers may migrate back. Also naturally, neglect or piracy will cause morale to fall and planetary population to migrate elsewhere.
6. Set large-scale orbital bombing to quickly reduce the planet's morale to zero, naturally causing all ships to evacuate.

That's all it would take. Each of the above is a small change. There are no huge additions here. It's all numbers. It's very much unlike adding new planet types. Mr. Parnell could code it all in a single day, after we get that far. The underlying mechanics are going to be added anyway - it's just a question of whether we want to hook them together and give planets a reason to exist as far as gameplay goes, other than as factories.

Everything else I didn't mention in that little list is going into the game anyway. Like I said, you just hook it up. Judging by your posts, I'm pretty sure you're not a programmer... but if you'd ever done any object-oriented coding, you'd agree - hooking everything up is no great task. If everything beneath it is built, hooking it up is as simple as calling on different parts of the code that already exist and putting it together. And it will be. Civilian populations will take on the personality differences that the factions/systems will already have. Escorts will be assigned via the same systems factions use. It's all very simple, not much has to be added. It's a tiny change that makes a huge difference.

Interesting. So, the system would be as follows: civilians generate resources - efficiency in generating resources comes from number of civilians - in exchange for money by trading said resources to traders, who then trade goods between various points (be it station, planet, etc.)? I don't see tourism as needed (traffic for the sake of traffic), more like migration to get a better job elsewhere (no matter if it's station, planet, etc.). Rich civilians would then get their own ship, taking into consideration what's the most needed job in the system they're currently at thus becoming owners of their own ship.

They're civilians - they leave large-scale conflicts to factions.

Objection. Civilians play a huge part in any conflict. It should affect them. There should be reason to wage war for breathing space (Germany in 1939), to be able to include civilians as manpower reserve of your armed forces (war between U.S.S.R. and Germany is good example). Each conflict requires manpower and each manpower is affected by war, economy, etc.