Nicely done! (with appropriate choice of color)
So according to these estimates, total population across all Tri-Tachyon colonies is between 1.2 million and 12 million humans. Does that sound right?
Considering player fleet may have between 1000 and 3000 crew (ok, more or less), that's an interesting perspective.
Also, I'm a bit concerned about size 3 colonies. I mean, how many people are required just to operate the spaceport? I feel like Hegemony inspection should be dispatched there to check for unlawful equipment.
Call the lore master immediately, people of the Sector need to know the truth! :D
Cool! This is really well presented. I was just thinking about this the other day but was way too lazy to put the numbers together myself; thanks for doing it!
It also really explains why player colony sizes were capped at 6 in the 0.95a - where would all the people be coming from if it was allowed to be any bigger!
And this is just the settled peoples living on the worlds and stations!!
Wait are you telling me that all the core worlds combined are at best not even 15% of earths current population?by the population size factor, yes. But I'd take it with a grain of salt since it's a gameplay abstraction.
Wow, I never really thought about how Chico is home to literally half the population in the Sector. Great work!Yeah I was surprised by too! That 1 factor difference makes a giant difference! Although Chico seems small when compared to the Earth's 7 billion, by the standards of the Persean system it really is a hive world!
The sector definitely seems underpopulated when you look at the numbers. A lot of planets certainly aren't written like they're the size of a single city rather than an entire world, but if you just think of it more abstractly with a size 6 planet as being bigger than a 5 and smaller than a 7, then it seems a lot less odd.yeah it doesn't seem supported by lore and is likely just a gameplay abstraction. even chico being sub a billion seems rather low.
Good LuddYep, def made me want go rewatch Powers of 10. Diktat did have the advantage of Opis blowing up and creating a refugee crisis. I also feel like their high pop might be a hold over from being the second system ever added. Probably the real reason they get a higher pop is to gameplay balance how few planets they have. Population also has diminishing returns on industrial base in game (Chico doesn't produce 100 times everyone for example), so they look more balanced on the market screen. I def feel the planet count graph more accurately depicts the power dynamics described in lore. Might add another graph that counts without the powers of 10 to see what the distribution is like.
If you just look at the colony counts and don't think too hard about the order-of-magnitude implications of the market sizes (like I did), League looks like a near-peer competitor to Hegemony, and Diktat like its dictator proxy state. But by population, the Diktat is almost as big as the League, which is just big enough to be a moderate inconvenience to the Hegemony.
Although mapping population to strength clearly has its limits (RL example: compare India with the US). Tri-Tachyon did stand a credible chance of winning the Second AI War against the 100 times larger Hegemony.
It's also worth considering that most of the worlds in the sector are pioneer colonies that were abandoned halfway through development. I would imagine that they are, in general, not that welcoming Human life outside of the developed areas. An entire planet with the population of New York City is still going to feel crowded if the majority of the population is stuffed into a developed habitable zone roughly the size of New York City.Good point! A lot of even the inhabited ones are harsh planets. Even Chico has pollution and a thin atmosphere. The Collapse did a ton of damage, and the wars since haven't helped. Most planets aren't even self-sufficient food wise so a high mortality rate is a given.
If you just look at the colony counts and don't think too hard about the order-of-magnitude implications of the market sizes (like I did),It's an easy mistake, because the game says size 8 is ten times bigger than 7, and 7 is ten times bigger than 6, but in practice it's closer to simple linear progression, with size 7 being 16% bigger than size 6, and size 8 being 14% bigger than size 7.
I imagine Chicomoztoc is a hive world not because of its big population, but rather because how it's built. Consider land on this planet, how would you zone it? This is the future: let's assume we have infrastructure similar to current (say, trains for freight and planes for people), but from The Future: trains are super efficient (maybe they're all maglev or something), planes are replaced with space shuttles because lol, what atmosphere? Moving stuff and people around is easier and cheaper, than on Earth. Now, back to zoning: why would you not give away big swathes of land? Nobody lives there, there's no nature to preserve, there's no cultural significance. You can farm, but the soil is poor, contaminated and uncompetitive. There are some natural resources, but mining companies can grab them on their own. After that, you are left with lots of quickly traversible land with no purpose. If some company needed and wanted to buy an area about the size of United Kingdom (assuming Chicomoztoc is Earth-sized), or about 0,048% of the planet's surface... Why wouldn't you let them? You have enough land to do that over two thousand times more. Maybe automated factories are just this big, or they are cheaper this way. People likely would still live in shielded cities, because it's cheaper to make one big habitable space, than multiple smaller ones, and because transport is cheap (what air drag?).That's a good point about much of even the more habitable planets having large swaths that wouldn't foster life. Even Eventide, a size 7 and on the nicer scale, is a tidally locked planet only livable because of solar mirrors that still don't cover the whole world.
...Chicomoztoc is supposedly all underground arcologies, so nothing like what I just thought of. Oops.If you just look at the colony counts and don't think too hard about the order-of-magnitude implications of the market sizes (like I did),
It's an easy mistake, because the game says size 8 is ten times bigger than 7, and 7 is ten times bigger than 6, but in practice it's closer to simple linear progression, with size 7 being 16% bigger than size 6, and size 8 being 14% bigger than size 7.
I feel like the Diktat is a retired player who found a nice system right in the middle of the core... great access, good migration, overlapping defense fleets!
The data visualization is really cool, thanks for making and sharing! :D
Is it the nano-forges or the fuel cores that basically 'grow' their own facility? Figures that due to how technology works even small colonies can have disproportionately massive amounts of production.Fuel-cores grow yes. And they can work on a planet with only 1000-10,000 people so seems like they are very automated.
Thank you for putting into graphs what i constantly though about regarding the sector's lore!That's a good point about Chico. Re-read the lore, they are only ever called hive-cities, not hive worlds so the population is disproportionately crowded into the more livable areas.
And yes, the total population seem pitiful, but remember those points:
-Human population normally does not grow fast, the demographic transition being the anomaly.
-The Persean sector is closer to the early than the modern New World, colonisation effort was still in progress and several projects were left unfinished during the collapse.
-Most of those worlds are barely habitable and probably not welcoming to human life, even relatively good ones like Eventide orCatachanJangala.
-Gilead being the VIP club of the space Papal states mean you can't really just go there, just like not everyone can live in a little rural house and rather has to find work in an overcrowded industrial zone.
-The pictures we're given of Chicomoztoc is that of large domes on the planet's surface, cramming the entirety of Russia or Brazil into that will surely look like what's depicted in the flavour text. Most of the planet is probably a barren wasteland.
Population gives power, but there are other factors. It seem the Hegemony is running with similar issues to that of Earth in The Expanse, and the initial advance of the XIVth most likely tripped on itself when fleet officiers suddenly became governors.
Add this to the armada already on wits end at arrival and even minor resistance would be problematic, the already stable and local League was therefore extremely advantaged.
TT's power lie in it's prior position as a dominating corporation even when the Domain was around, they're the only ones with the good and/or questionnable stuff.
The Church is, well, the medieval Church in space, and the Diktat has the geographical advantage of three major worlds in a single system between all the other powers.
-Human population normally does not grow fast, the demographic transition being the anomaly.
Very cool thread!Thanks for writing such an amazingly lived in place! At certain scale numbers just becomes meaningless, more isn't better. You get planets that are one biome and planets of hats. Sci-fi has to straddle a line between hard science numbers (sizes, distances, population) and how inhumanly alien they would be in practice, which Starsector's world does a great job at.
[I have a bit of a hang-up about how a lot of fantastic worldbuilding - scifi or not - doesn't have much respect for scale. (He says, writing for a game with hyperspace, popping between planets in mere days, and other absurdities. But at least it's not pretending to be an entire galaxy!) ... like, saying 'a thousand planets' sounds cool and is fun to drop as a line, but just imagine trying to comprehend what that means. If each of those planets has a billion people on it, that's a trillion people. No one really deals with the consequence of that number of people, the number of cultures and subcultures and ideas that would spin out from them all the time. It's too big. (Admittedly, some good science fiction does deal with trying to comprehend inhuman scales. We're, uh, not doing that here.)
It requires such massive abstraction that... well, the go-to would be Star Wars, right? How many planets are in Star Wars? Answers vary, but like: a thousand? a million? 50 million? How many have we seen across the whole of the behemoth of Star Wars IP- a couple hundred, maybe 0.002 percent of the alleged total? The difference between the stated number and experienced number hits me as a bit much, especially when we're asked to believe we're dealing with the top dogs of this universe. It can feel like begging for gravitas by throwing zeroes at you without earning them. (But who knows, maybe most of these planets have like 50 people and are super boring.) Anyway, to convey the universe, each planet is not treated as a planet, but is effectively treated as a single region or city. It has to be cut down like that so each planet has like 2 biomes and perhaps 3 significant locations, max, otherwise it's too much for human comprehension.
Starsector absolutely does this same thing, though reduced by a few orders of magnitude. Each planet has basically one thing going on, because that's the comprehensible scope of the game. The social scale of the game feels more like, I dunno, the seas of southeast Asia in the 17th century - getting between islands takes a couple days, crossing the span of the reasonably known world might take on the order of months, depending. This provides that human scale; a player can feel like they know the Persean Sector. Likewise, I feel like it's a lot more believable for one super cool space captain to have a large effect on a shared human demographic unit of somewhere around 200-2000 million people than doing the same in a population of trillions.]
[Ooh, in an alternate universe, it'd be cool if Starsector was set in just one solar system with similar game scale. ... Something like "Against A Dark Background"...]
Having all of starsector in a single solar system immediately reminds me of Firefly. And given that one comparison I can definitely see it working.If I knew how to mod better want to remake old Corvus updated to the new version, where you got all the factions in the same system. I feel like the detection mechanics would be really fun with such a dense concertation and multi-side fights.
I can't remember the same, but one of the PL systems has a whole drama thing going on between all it's planet states and the various monarchs or whatever it was that rules over it.Persean is filled with drama and semi-failed states, def ripe for a whole setting.
You could have a whole setting just out of the interaction of those planets in of themselves, let alone the rest of the sector at large.
[I have a bit of a hang-up about how a lot of fantastic worldbuilding - scifi or not - doesn't have much respect for scale.Not just worldbuilding...
It has to be cut down like that so each planet has like 2 biomes and perhaps 3 significant locations, max, otherwise it's too much for human comprehension.I remember telling Alex to cull the number of planets for some reason, at some point, because some were functionally identical to one another.
[Ooh, in an alternate universe, it'd be cool if Starsector was set in just one solar system with similar game scale. ... Something like "Against A Dark Background"...]Starsector could easily be set in a single star system! The issue, of course, would be that hyperspace travel and star system mechanics would have to be reworked, the planets would have to be replaced with space stations, swarms of habitats, some cool megastructures... Which would be bad for average person's expectations, since you gotta have different
That's a good point about much of even the more habitable planets having large swaths that wouldn't foster life. Even Eventide, a size 7 and on the nicer scale, is a tidally locked planet only livable because of solar mirrors that still don't cover the whole world.Since interstellar trade is normal, it would make sense that the planets with the best soil export their food and planets with worse soil are noncompetitive.
That's a good point about Chico. Re-read the lore, they are only ever called hive-cities, not hive worlds so the population is disproportionately crowded into the more livable areas.Sooo I could possibly be still right nevertheless! Maybe.
Think about the amount of fleets with 3,000 + individuals on board who get wiped out in a single battle, sure some people probably get away in escape pods, but how many? Who rescues them?Think about how the game conjures as many of them as it wants out of nothing, at any given moment. The game does not flinch from spewing unlimited endgame fleets and fringe zombie (pirate/pather) bases to sacrifice to the bit-thirsty player demon god.
But that scale wouldn't even account for real life earth with our 8 or so billion people.
QuoteThink about the amount of fleets with 3,000 + individuals on board who get wiped out in a single battle, sure some people probably get away in escape pods, but how many? Who rescues them?Think about how the game conjures as many of them as it wants out of nothing, at any given moment. The game does not flinch from spewing unlimited endgame fleets and fringe zombie (pirate/pather) bases to sacrifice to the bit-thirsty player demon god.
Bonus DP from objectives are irrelevant for the player since in any fight that is not trivial (one player cannot steamroll), the enemy will steal then hold those points. The best the player can do is capture points immediately and deploy ships before the enemy with superior forces steal them for the rest of the fight.
You guys are really, really underestimating human population growth. The only reason we sat at a billion people for so long was infant mortality, we kept dying off before we could grow up for thousands of years. The moment we hit the twentieth century, the population started climbing, and in little over a hundred years it's hit 7.9 Billion. You might be tempted to point out that we're living in a time of relative peace, but that's actually inconsequential to my point since the greatest areas of population growth are third-world countries that live in conditions much worse than The Persean Sector. Mogadishu is so bad every two weeks I ask someone "Hey have you heard about that terrorist attack in Mogadishu a few days ago?" Without looking at the news and I've yet to be wrong.
Even with epidemics, being ravaged by war and genocide, and a phenomenally low life-expectancy, the population of Africa went from 177 million to 1.2 Billion in Fifty years The biggest reason for that was infant mortality rate dropping so suddenly. And that's still not hitting the resource cap. It's expected to hit 4.7 billion in 2100. That's more than half our current population on one continent.
You all seem to forget that when the going gets tough, humans screw like rabbits. The worse conditions are, the more children people have.
Which also means if the player loses ships (die in battle, retreat after PPT expires, whatever) after the enemy steals those points, player cannot reinforce, and it is likely to snowball into the player's defeat.Bonus DP from objectives are irrelevant for the player since in any fight that is not trivial (one player cannot steamroll), the enemy will steal then hold those points. The best the player can do is capture points immediately and deploy ships before the enemy with superior forces steal them for the rest of the fight.
I noticed this as well. Even if I assign my entire fleet to hold one point, the AI will retreat. 3 capitals, side-by-side, will retreat instead of hold their ground.
Look at Europe - it's falling apart, and people AREN'T effing like rabbits. But that's politics, so let's not go there.
[Ooh, in an alternate universe, it'd be cool if Starsector was set in just one solar system with similar game scale. ... Something like "Against A Dark Background"...]
Very cool thread!What is the lore explanation for the planet population tiers being represented as powers of ten but the income and fleet power they produce scaling almost linearly with the tier number rather than logarithmically?
[I have a bit of a hang-up about how a lot of fantastic worldbuilding - scifi or not - doesn't have much respect for scale. (He says, writing for a game with hyperspace, popping between planets in mere days, and other absurdities. But at least it's not pretending to be an entire galaxy!) ... like, saying 'a thousand planets' sounds cool and is fun to drop as a line, but just imagine trying to comprehend what that means. If each of those planets has a billion people on it, that's a trillion people. No one really deals with the consequence of that number of people, the number of cultures and subcultures and ideas that would spin out from them all the time. It's too big. (Admittedly, some good science fiction does deal with trying to comprehend inhuman scales. We're, uh, not doing that here.)
It requires such massive abstraction that... well, the go-to would be Star Wars, right? How many planets are in Star Wars? Answers vary, but like: a thousand? a million? 50 million? How many have we seen across the whole of the behemoth of Star Wars IP- a couple hundred, maybe 0.002 percent of the alleged total? The difference between the stated number and experienced number hits me as a bit much, especially when we're asked to believe we're dealing with the top dogs of this universe. It can feel like begging for gravitas by throwing zeroes at you without earning them. (But who knows, maybe most of these planets have like 50 people and are super boring.) Anyway, to convey the universe, each planet is not treated as a planet, but is effectively treated as a single region or city. It has to be cut down like that so each planet has like 2 biomes and perhaps 3 significant locations, max, otherwise it's too much for human comprehension.
Starsector absolutely does this same thing, though reduced by a few orders of magnitude. Each planet has basically one thing going on, because that's the comprehensible scope of the game. The social scale of the game feels more like, I dunno, the seas of southeast Asia in the 17th century - getting between islands takes a couple days, crossing the span of the reasonably known world might take on the order of months, depending. This provides that human scale; a player can feel like they know the Persean Sector. Likewise, I feel like it's a lot more believable for one super cool space captain to have a large effect on a shared human demographic unit of somewhere around 200-2000 million people than doing the same in a population of trillions.]
[Ooh, in an alternate universe, it'd be cool if Starsector was set in just one solar system with similar game scale. ... Something like "Against A Dark Background"...]
What is the lore explanation for the planet population tiers being represented as powers of ten but the income and fleet power they produce scaling almost linearly with the tier number rather than logarithmically?The answer: gameplay > lore. I don't like the implementation myself, but I don't think it's going anywhere any time soon.
Exponential profits meet exponential costs ;DAnd exponential margins, though given the almost anarchic state of the post-Collapse sector perhaps we're meant to imagine that a populous planet is like a realm in Crusader Kings 3 (or 2 to a less extent), in which a single ruler can leverage only a small portion of the realm's resources. Administrators demand an absurd amount of money, perhaps the a substantial cut is taken by all lesser officials.
You guys are really, really underestimating human population growth. The only reason we sat at a billion people for so long was infant mortality, we kept dying off before we could grow up for thousands of years. The moment we hit the twentieth century, the population started climbing, and in little over a hundred years it's hit 7.9 Billion. You might be tempted to point out that we're living in a time of relative peace, but that's actually inconsequential to my point since the greatest areas of population growth are third-world countries that live in conditions much worse than The Persean Sector. Mogadishu is so bad every two weeks I ask someone "Hey have you heard about that terrorist attack in Mogadishu a few days ago?" Without looking at the news and I've yet to be wrong.
Even with epidemics, being ravaged by war and genocide, and a phenomenally low life-expectancy, the population of Africa went from 177 million to 1.2 Billion in Fifty years The biggest reason for that was infant mortality rate dropping so suddenly. And that's still not hitting the resource cap. It's expected to hit 4.7 billion in 2100. That's more than half our current population on one continent.
You all seem to forget that when the going gets tough, humans screw like rabbits. The worse conditions are, the more children people have. Even though we might not have as many children at a time as other species, female humans are capable of pumping out a kid every year starting at like sixteen until their fifties (depending on the individual). Go watch the Duggars if you want to see what that looks like with any kind of access to modern medicine. Of course, that's not taking safety into consideration, but as life gets more dangerous and harder, people start to care less about the 'safety risks' of things like pregnancy. Even with access to birth control, regions with less wealth and less safety still have higher birth rates, as exemplified by every ghetto in the US.
For the Sector to be sitting around a billion people after two hundred years, either conditions are bordering on 'Antartica in the middle of a blizzard with medieval level medicine' bad, or every major population center is enjoying the kind of success of a first-world country while also having hit their resource caps. As long as people aren't getting nuked, it doesn't really matter how many fleets get blown up, it's inconsequential to the population.
To put it in perspective, if we average it together, our population is currently growing at an average of a bit over 1% per year, compounding annually (and decreasing as we approach our resource limit). Even if the Persean Sector's population grew at the same rate, that's at least 1.7 million up to 17.7 million people a year. That's 590 to 5,900 3000 person fleets being destroyed per year with a hundred percent mortality rate. Despite what you might think, humanity just doesn't have the economic prowess to wage a war that can outpace our birthrate unless you specifically target population centers with intent to wipe them out, as evidenced by, once again, Africa, which I will remind you has basically stayed in a perpetual state of war since the turn of the century.
To put it simply, the numbers are in, and Alex got his wrong.
What is the lore explanation for the planet population tiers being represented as powers of ten but the income and fleet power they produce scaling almost linearly with the tier number rather than logarithmically?I imagine this has to do largely with automation and development. The limit to production isn’t necessarily the amount of people standing around but the arable land, urbanized space, etc. Most of the population of any given colony, I imagine, is dedicated just to expanding/maintaining the infrastructure of the colony.
Obviously representing the powers of ten in productivity would destroy the faction balance but you could just give the Perseans a T8 planet or give Chico more negative modifiers.
Edit: Since I don't know how to delete this necro-post might as well commit to it. I think the sector's growth is comparable to Australia or Canada, lots of available land but only a tiny portion thereof is suitable to urbanised society. Given this game is Sid Meier's Pirates in space it makes sense that it would be written to have 18th century population figures.
3 * 10^3 + 18 * 10^4 + 25 * 10^5 + 5 * 10^6 + 7 * 10^7 + 1 * 10^8
= 177,683,000
3 * 9.999 * 10^3 + 18 * 9.9999 * 10^4 + 25 * 9.99999 * 10^5 + 5 * 9.999999 * 10^6 + 7 * 9.9999999 * 10^7 + 1 * 9.99999999 * 10^8
= 1,776,829,941
Although mapping population to strength clearly has its limits (RL example: compare India with the US). Tri-Tachyon did stand a credible chance of winning the Second AI War against the 100 times larger Hegemony.