So regarding a few topics I have some thoughts

Military Snowballing

Ship Variety

I think the native Damage and Health bonuses of Hunters and Coordinators should apply instead to their allied Attacker and Support ships, that way Small size ships will do best when combined with their Medium equivalents, while Medium ships will be missing the full potential of their buff without Small ships to accompany them.

Command Points

I agree with Plutar and OP, insofar as Universal Aerodynamics should become a really early CP tech with only +1 CP per Hull Type, and then there should be a +1 CP improvement for each Military Stage Unlock. That way a consistent, quick growth in Fleet sizes will require maintaining some very consistent Science production. Of course, I also believe that...

Hull Quadrants

...Hulls should really be moved elsewhere already. Maybe move them to some sort of an out-of-context fifth quadrant or something by the side of the screen with some other stuff, I dunno, but the Military Quadrant is too full to take them even though they just don't belong in the Empire Development quadrant. It just drives me nuts that Hulls and a few other technologies are just in all the wrong places.

Fleet Life

Triple or even quadruple Fleet Health, bump up the construction costs a considerable amount, and ships will become something I both can and should look after again. Not like now where even if I did care enough to save my fleets it wouldn't matter because they will either destroy all challengers without a scratch or die to a man in any given battle.

Tactics

We need tactics to really break down more nicely by weapon and module types and such instead of all these weird tactics about destroying Manpower or what have you. I rarely if ever give a crap about destroying Manpower using guns, if I wanted Manpower gone I'd just spam Boarding Pods.

Now, regarding the snowball in general, I'd like to bring up a problem near and dear to my heart as both a Horatio and old school Drakken player, Growth.

Food Snowballing

Population Growth

Firstly, the lack of scaling population growth costs makes for some really bad economic snowballing, where once a system hits the 150 Food mark it is guaranteed a new Pop every 2 turns, and once it hits the 300 mark it's guaranteed a new pop every turn. Each unit of population on a decent Food producing system (aka the only systems available early game) can just accelerate the rate at which you grow, making Population Growth a snowball mechanic all on its own. Which ties into two other problems...

Conquest Reward

If all the systems are growing at maximum pace, that means the reward for taking a system grows extremely quickly at some point. Every system we can conquer, turns out to be a full system, for much of the game, requiring minimal further investment of time to grow the population. This just makes Military snowballing even worse, because each conquered system is itself already snowballing.

Overpopulation Disapproval

I've heard it often that there's not enough Approval management. It's very, very easy to keep your Approval maxed out all the time without a care in the world. I think a large part of this is the fact that Overpopulation only provides very, very minor Disapproval- which of course it does, because our population is growing so quickly that if Overpopulation actually did enough harm to care, we'd probably end up drowning in it due to our rapidly exploding population!

If Population Growth was made to scale with current population to slow growth, then Overpopulation Disapproval could be suitably buffed to a very large amount that low Food/Growth factions wouldn't necessarily have to worry about for much of the game, but would nonetheless present an Approval obstacle before taking war and Overcolonization into account. And with slower growing systems, the relative reward of Conquest would also flatten out a bit.

Personally my own math suggests the following- Increase the Growth necessary to gain a new Pop by 100-150 for each Pop on system, add a 100-150 Food cost on Spaceport to prevent circumventing the cost, and add a .5 Overpopulation Disapproval malus for each Overpop Slot filled in a planet for all Pops on that planet.

So for example, at 3 Overpop slots filled on a 12 slot planet, it'd be 1.5 * 12 = 18 Overpopulation Disapproval total. That would make a conqueror think twice about adding more systems before taking care of their own, certainly, or at least to not try and grow every system they take to max population so quickly. (An alternate possibility would be to add Growth Consumption, which would be far higher than Food Consumption but only affects the filling of the Growth meter, and thus does not affect Manpower or Food conversion)

And on the note of snowballing and Drakken,

Influence Snowballing

Unlike EL, there is no innate Influence cost to expanding, and the means by which we afford laws are mostly the same as the means by which we produce Influence- on a per Pop basis. It was a bit different in EL, because while each city bumped up Influence costs, it bumped them up even more for the higher tier effects. It was not a linear increase like ES2 has, 1-2-3-4, but rather the second tier cost three times as much as the first, the third cost almost three times more than the second, the fourth cost more than twice the third, and you had no choice but to stack the costs of the first three in order to get the fourth. That's ignoring the fact that actually, if you were trying to go into all four Empire plans at once, each city was actually providing each of those increases four separate times. In addition, the Influence costs were based on Cities owned, but all of the passive Influence bonuses were too small to cover all the increases incurred by a city. In order to actually cover all costs, you had to actually switch gears and turn your population towards Influence production.

In ES2 though, because you pick and choose your laws and can take a high tier effect without agreeing to the cost of a lower tier effect as well, the costs just don't increase that much, and most people can cover all their Influence costs with just their home system. All it takes to hit the highest law cost is 4 Influence per Pop, which is quite possible with all manner of combinations of Luxuries and Heroes and the like. 

The simplest solution I see is to add an initial per System cost like we had in beta on top of the per Pop cost, and take the per Pop Influence bonus of Museums and move it much much later, making Museums provide a bonus based on System or Planets perhaps. Something like 25 Influence per System on the initial Law cost for each tier of law, bumped up by an additional 10 for each system over the Colonization cap. Also just adding higher tier laws with greater costs. I don't know necessarily, I'm spitballing here.

I actually doubt that rising a growth cap for each pop is healthy for the game. Mainly because your population is closely realted to Conscription which is like a super anti-snowballish tool against early invasions. I found myself in situations where I had around 10 pop per system at turn 30 and only 5-6 Conscriptions in a row allowed me to hold against an early rush and counterattack. It can even easily hold a system for some turns if you are at 0 defensive capacity (!). Imagine 10 pop is 3k food for now, but with your suggestion I could only have 5 pop and be snowballed and destroyed..

Kinda agree on other points though, except mb influence cause I just like the advantage of early unique planets and their influence per pop bonus so much. It sometimes feels more tempting to go for a system of 3 with a Teonha on it instead of system of 5 just for that early influence and law pushing. You then feel really rewarded for each pop you generate on those. I actually never felt like I have too much influence (I am mainly a democracy/federation player) and I always utilized it to the max. I never felt like Museums are op, instead I felt like THIS is the one I need right now to sustain an extra powerfull law or to store some influence to turn into diplomatic proposals. Isn't that a good thing? If you are overflowing with influence it seems like you are not using it to the max. Pacific conversion anyone? All tier 4 laws? As sophons I sometimes pushed +33% on weapons from scientists and +33% health and dmg from militarists and + 33% health from industrialists at the same time and damn it cost a lot

You can slow down population snowballing without changing the Growth Cap.

All you need to do is make each subsequent unit of population consume a greater share of food:

• 1 pop = 6 consumption
• 2 pop = 13 consumption (6 + 7)
• 3 pop = 21 consumption (6 + 7 + 8)
• 4 pop = 30 consumption (6+ 7 + 8 + 9)
• 5 pop = 40 consumption (6 + 7 + 8 + 9 + 10)
• 10 pop = 105 consumption (6 + 7 + 8 + 9 + 10 + 11 + 12 + 13 + 14 + 15)
• 20 pop = 310 consumption 
• 30 pop = 615 consumption

etc. etc. etc. something, something, calculus

This would essentially make it require quite a bit of food tech/hero skill investment and population micromanagement to cap those high population systems. A few things to note:

1. Riftborn Pop build-to-spaceport spam would need to be addressed (it already does imho).
2. The numbers would likely need to be tweaked to balance with food production. Mine were only intended to demonstrate the increasing ratio of consumption:population.
3. Super Biofuel would need to be balanced (I would suggest lowering the tech tier so it becomes something useable in mid-game with a lesser investment cost and lesser industry gain due to the consumption rework).
4. Very low food quantities in the - or + should be ignored within a certain margin (maybe + or - P where [P = Population/2] so a system with 30 pop would neglect any food within the +15 to-15 range ... explain it away with "seasonal variance" or "general waste" for + or "rationing" for -) to avoid the current +1 pop, -1 pop, +1 pop, -1 pop back and forth when gaining a pop puts you in the negative, then losing a pop puts you in the positive again, which tends to happen from time to time (and it is annoying).

I would love to hear some ideas on this proposal. Idea link here if anyone is interested.

mamarider wrote:

I actually doubt that rising a growth cap for each pop is healthy for the game. Mainly because your population is closely realted to Conscription which is like a super anti-snowballish tool against early invasions. I found myself in situations where I had around 10 pop per system at turn 30 and only 5-6 Conscriptions in a row allowed me to hold against an early rush and counterattack. It can even easily hold a system for some turns if you are at 0 defensive capacity (!). Imagine 10 pop is 3k food for now, but with your suggestion I could only have 5 pop and be snowballed and destroyed. ...

See, the problem with your proposal is that if it roughly halves your population, it's also roughly halving your opponents population. So they either take twice as long to summon the same rush, or rush half as large a military force in the same time. And either way, by many accounts the ability to indefinitely defend against invasion using Conscription is considered a problem.

Abrasax wrote:

You can slow down population snowballing without changing the Growth Cap.

All you need to do is make each subsequent unit of population consume a greater share of food: ...

I'm going to have to shoot this down and say from experience, it doesn't work. I was of this opinion for a while, and worked together with CyRob to mod the hell out of Consumption to test my theories, including the one you present there. It really, really does not work, because of how badly it affects everything else Food related. This is because you need population to consume such gigantic amounts of Food for it to have the desired effect, that there's none left for other purposes, including Manpower, which plummeted under a similar scheme.

This is, however, why I proposed above that we can instead add _Growth_ consumption, which is not technically the same thing as Food as presented in the UI. This way the population could be made to grow ever slower without horribly affecting everything else Food related, only the rate of growth.

samsonazs wrote

The problem is that this curve needs to be increased more.
...

With that in play you would need to have food buildings to get to overpopulation so there is no problem to have a bigged approval pennalty for overpopulation.

You more or less understand my point, though as before, actually increasing Food consumption causes myriad issues for other things tied to Food, and as such it would be better to consume the Growth that Food gets turned into in the Growth meter on the left. But the point that you would then need to focus on Food before having to worry about Overpopulation, justifying higher Overpopulation penalties, is exactly in accordance with what I meant.

samsonazs wrote:

...

Influence

...

Interesting ideas, that I have no particular opinion on either way as to their effectiveness. The only problem is that the Empire Plan system doesn't really work with ES2 because ES2 doesn't have Pop shuffling between jobs the way EL did, so there's no opportunity cost to making more Influence- what you get is what you get, more or less.

I do think the game should have Party laws going up to 6 though. Maybe not 12, but perhaps there could be a button which doubles the consumption of a law to increase all its effects, or something.

Food consumption should be completely detached from conversion to manpower. If it wasn't detached when modding, then the equations were borked. Base food conversion to manpower is 10% of net gross food production.

System Food = 88, Conversion to Manpower = 8.8

System Food = 500, Conversion to Manpower = 50

The single best piece of evidence proving this detachment comes from improvements like Patriot Pills or Exotic Rations. If it were calculated AFTER the food consumption, these improvements would never put you in the negative. It wouldn't be mathematically possible. They can and do put you in the negative. One of the first things I do when conquering enemy star systems is to curb population loss. First place I check is Constructed System Improvements. If Patriot Pills or Exotic Rations are built, I scrap them immediately. If it was calculated after consumption, this would not work to bring the negative value to a positive value.

It wasn't the system design's fault. It was the modding.

Sure, maybe it was the mod, though I have greater faith in the people I was working with than for them to make a basic mistake of that sort.

Either way, Consumption doesn't work as a solution, because it has to be so mind-numbingly massive. If it reduces 1200 Food to 301, the consumption increase has effectively done nothing for population growth. If it decreases any amount to 301, it's done nothing. And even then you need to lower Food production all the way to 149 just to make a difference of two turns per Pop. If it decreases Food by 10000 but doesn't reduce it past 300, it's done nothing, and to get a mere 3 turn increase requires reducing Food all the way to 75 or lower.

Just increasing Food consumption leads to having no Food to work with, because population growth is the absolute, only FIDSI where progressing to bigger and better things doesn't result in increasing costs. Buildings and ships cost more and more Industry and Dust, Technologies cost more and more Science, Laws cost more and more Influence up to a fairly low limit, but Growth never changes.

Just with the examples I gave for consumption increase curves, a population of 30 would need to produce a little over 20 food per population just to sustain itself. And for Horatio, their whole gimmick is that they don't need those food improvements. If there are Horatio players out there investing in them, I hope they are running BioFuel production builds. And if all you want to discuss is the extreme margins, then you willingly ignore the majority of systems out there that aren't producing 1200 food per turn.

A majority of my systems when I am not running BioFuel builds run about 500- 800 (food before consumption) with moderate food investment and the 25% food boost from ecstatic. And as I stated earlier, the numbers could be tweaked. Increase consumption incrementally by 2 instead of 1 as I did and those requirements will rapidly rise. 1000+ food to support a population of 30? It can be done.

I'm getting the feeling you'd rather just argue to argue instead. After all, you'd rather have faith in people modifying code than the basic math that I can present with consistent results from the 50+ save files I still have.

That's the nature of Food. Why would a faction like Horatio (who essentially are the people at the restaurants who only eat the half-portions) feel good about overproducing Food?

That makes no sense.

I feel great if I have a healthy cushion in the bank.

I feel great if I get a lot of work done around the house. 

I feel great if I have a ton of sway in social situations.

I feel great if I can invent new things and cure diseases.

I don't feel great if I have so much food I can't find anywhere to put it. That's how food works. You need enough to get by. The problem in ES2 isn't that all that excess food is a waste. The problem is that it is way too easy to have the excess food.

The only other resource like that is Influence, but only because they haven't added enough Influence sinks for mid-late game. Luckily there are some great ideas out there which could fill that role.

1. Influence Wars for Minor Factions
2. Alliance Voting Systems
3. Multi-Party Laws
4. Influence Others' Elections via Espionage

I also think Influence Upkeep should be introduced for diplomatic agreements instead of them just being one-and-done, just like wars need the occasional influence dump to keep them going.

But on the Food topic, I think  mamarider hit the nail on the head here:

mamarider wrote:

On that 39 population system I have 104 leftover food production WITHOUT ANY food oriented buildings, laws or hero skills (no hero assigned). That is just crazy.

And here comes a real problem. Why does average lava have less pop slots than average forest? Population ROCKS in this game. You want 1-2 pop much more than you want +12-24 industry ALL THE TIME.. Because all those bonuses from Specs and Improvements will turn that 1 pop into smth like +10 FIDSI at some point.

I think pop slots need to be the same on all planets. I think that inhospitable planets must have some pop slots locked at first but those should be unlockable upon reaching new eras. For now there is simply no reason to keep your lavas and barrens, you just terraform them all and it kills system managing.

I might not agree with his solution to the problem, but I do believe those rough planets should have a much better FIDSI output than their Terraformed versions. I would rather see them modify the improvements to focus much less on the "+FIDSI per pop" and more on the "+FIDSI per planet type". There should be viable builds that exploit Toxic planets to dramatic effect, or ways to squeeze serious Industry from Lava planets and serious Science from Barren planets. Sadly, the most productive planets in late game are easily the Fertile/Temperate simply because of the increased population caps multiplied by the high per pop FIDSI. ES2 very much focuses on quantity over quality and that pigeon-holes playstyles.

Perhaps modifying the overpopulation disapproval and basing the overpopulation slots on planet-type instead of size, so Barren/Ice/Toxic/Ash/Lava would have 1 Overpopulation slot that hits hard to happiness and Ocean/Boreal/Forest/Terran/Jungle/Atoll would have 3 overpopulation slots that hit hard/harder/hardest, respectively? This would definitely change how people approach Huge Barrens and Tiny Forests. Modify happiness on some of them too. Why is a Gas Giant -5 happiness per pop and the Toxic -8? That really seems off.

Note: And the reason Food ends up going so high is the desirability of population max on fertiles means you end up terraforming everything to fertile. This means the Food production:consumption ratio massively diminishes in late game. The late game system should be set up to encourage people to trade away F for the IDS instead of the IDS being coupled with the best F. That's just bad design. Without that, the 1200 food on a system wouldn't be a regular thing for some people.