Honestly, let's not mess with things too much in terms of the economy basics. I'm not a big fan of requiring arbitrary resources for anything other than special (i.e. Galactic or one-per-civ) buildings, as that produces really bad choke points that, while Humans can be good at compensating, AIs have a hard time with.

Our current problem seems to be that Population and Raw Production are 1:1.  That's linear growth, and it's extremely hard to beat that with anything in the way of well-balanced improvements.  Given that Raw Production provides broad power - it's the economy as a whole - anything that provides direct improvement to it has to be VERY carefully managed.

The old method was Sqrt(pop) = Raw Production.   It think that's too harsh, but a good non-linear association would probably be best.

I'd vote for Logrithmic association between population and production, using Log Base 2.  That means you get doublings of production at 2, 4, 8, 16, and 32 population.  It means that it's not a huge deal if a planet has 8 or 9 population, whereas right now that 1 additional pop can be VERY significant in production output.

I guess what I'm trying to say here is this:

I'd rather we balance things with futzing with % bonuses on individual improvements AFTER we've cut down on the effects that huge populations have.  I think it's easier to do that than other approaches such a limiting number of buildings or requiring resources. 

We (the community) can then embark on a blitz of bonus balancing attempts, to find the right mix for everything, safe in the knowledge that the base mechanic of pop:raw production is settled and we're not going to be facing a drastic change in the overall strategy model.

Frog, are you arbitrarily going to cap city population? 

I only build a single city on planets anyway so it really does not affect me but will cities be 'upgradeable' so you can grow past the one population increase?

I DID make suggestions.

...Anyways, I'm ready to put this to the bygones.

Moving factories and laboratories to flat bonusses is key to balancing them vs cities (/asteroids). As a best practice I would even suggest this model:
 - all common improvements only provide flat bonusses.
 - all colony uniques provide percentage general bonus and a flat bonus from taken adjacency.
 - player and galaxy uniques provide percentages and/or empire wide percentages.
 - citizens provide percentages
 - exploration age techs provide flat bonusses
 - other techs provide percentages

This begs the question about what will happen to the space elevator. I would tweak above proposal to this:

Basic Factory (BF): 1.5 + .25/level giving 1 adjacency
and
Space Elevator (SE): 20% + .25/level giving 2 adjacency

for a 3 BF triangle this adds up to 6 manufacturingin both categories.
for a 2 BF+SE triangle this adds up to 5 manufacturing and +20%

Keep in mind, that there is a dynamic balance between flat and percent bonusses. Suppose you get to choose between +1 flat manufacturing and +10% manufacturing If you have 15 flat manufacturing allready, you gain more from adding +10%. If you have two workers on this world allready (+60%) the +10% still only add one manufacturing, but the +1 adds +1.6 due to the workers and is better again.

Let's talk about population: Keep the model mostly as it is now (people hate seeing numbers of things they use to play go down more than seeing numbers of things they don't play go up). Population is interconnected with some many other balance aspects, it is virtually impossible to change it without unbalancing something.

But I would suggest the following balance modification for synthetics:

base pop cap: 10
approval can stay at 100
popcap is increased via technologies:
 - up to 15 within age of exploration
 - up to 25 within age of war
 - up to 40 within third age
 - up to 100 after that

It's probably not perfect, but it's an economical stepping stone towards finding the right numbers for synthetics regardless on whether it will be completely tech absed or improvement based in the end.

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

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.

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.

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.

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? 

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.

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.

They do need to modernise the manual.

Please don't get rid of one. But I agree strongly that every resource (pop also being a resource) should have multiple effects so that you have to choose which effect you want to use (e. g. needing pop to build an improvement so that when you build one type like production you cannot build as much of another type like research because there is less pop left to build more improvements) or you have to make sacrifices to use it (like morale loss through high pop, what should have more effects than just lower productivity, like chance for rebellion).