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Starsector 0.97a is out! (02/02/24); New blog post: Simulator Enhancements (03/13/24)

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Author Topic: Calculating the Population Size of the Core Sector  (Read 15386 times)

Igncom1

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Re: Calculating the Population Size of the Core Sector
« Reply #30 on: May 18, 2021, 04:20:01 AM »

But that scale wouldn't even account for real life earth with our 8 or so billion people.
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Blue_Bear

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Re: Calculating the Population Size of the Core Sector
« Reply #31 on: May 18, 2021, 04:42:29 AM »

The main takeaway I get from this is that the loss of life in the sector from conflict/piracy alone should have crippled it by now.

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?

I guess on the other hand its a good explanation for why in Vanilla there are so few true conflicts, the loss of life in a real invasion would have the potential to cripple a faction manpower wise for a generation...
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Megas

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Re: Calculating the Population Size of the Core Sector
« Reply #32 on: May 18, 2021, 04:51:26 AM »

Quote
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.
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Vextor

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Re: Calculating the Population Size of the Core Sector
« Reply #33 on: May 18, 2021, 05:06:00 AM »

I wouldn't beat myself over calculating the sector's population size since it's heavily affected by gameplay mechanics. Just like the MCs in other games can eat 500 bullets then heal by taking 4 deeps breaths, but falls over when they get shot in the shoulder in a cutscene and limp for the level's remaining duration.

Also the kind of war policy and production the Persean sector indulges in, I'd assume the the population is in the tens of billions at least.
« Last Edit: May 18, 2021, 05:10:29 AM by Vextor »
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Pratapon51

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Re: Calculating the Population Size of the Core Sector
« Reply #34 on: May 18, 2021, 12:08:01 PM »

Better turn off your brain about how deserters regularly make off with entire battlefleets and a full complement of capital ships.  ;D
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robepriority

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Re: Calculating the Population Size of the Core Sector
« Reply #35 on: May 18, 2021, 12:52:52 PM »

I wonder if just slapping on an extra 2 magnitudes would solve these scale problems.

ElPresidente

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Re: Calculating the Population Size of the Core Sector
« Reply #36 on: May 18, 2021, 12:56:35 PM »

But that scale wouldn't even account for real life earth with our 8 or so billion people.

That's a rough example.
You can change numbers, add more tiers.


Also, given that the gate-collapse was an apocalyptic event, massive population decline doesn't seem far off.
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Scorpixel

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Re: Calculating the Population Size of the Core Sector
« Reply #37 on: May 18, 2021, 03:29:52 PM »

The gates closings were a cataclysmic event, it being called "The Collapse" is not an understatement.
Remember that the Core is all that barely survived due to the concentration of colonies in a somewhat functional state, everywhere else with planetary ruins, dead stations, ships and debris fields were lost to it, even what is left is made-up of unfinished, half-ruined projects.

A modern society can run with 1% of it's population in the military without issue, that would be 1.7/17 millions, more than enough to field everything in canon (=! pirate swarm/Nex fleets), and that's without considering how much more advanced the sector is compared to us.
Normal soldiers are beyond useless in space warfare. What are they going to do, shoot at the ship in orbit?

It's also far better to make a story, we're supposed to be in a "After the end" setting, which would get severely hurt if it went "Oh yes, the situation is dire, humanity is barely surviving over scraps, there's only nine hundred bajillion of us left!"

Too many stories throw-in wild numbers and low/high ball it horribly, here we see known humanity at (lowest estimate) half of what it was for most of written history, or early 20th century (highest), those are scales we can relate with, and immediately make us think "that's not good isn't it?"
« Last Edit: May 18, 2021, 03:37:40 PM by Scorpixel »
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JUDGE! slowpersun

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Re: Calculating the Population Size of the Core Sector
« Reply #38 on: May 18, 2021, 04:23:58 PM »

Quote
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.

From both a code design perspective and also just keeping CPU usage down, this is practically required unless you have a competent team dropping code.  Paradox's Stellaris transitioned from it's stupid and tedious but CPU efficient tile resource mini-game to pure numbers with WAAAY to much cross-checking, and essentially castrated an otherwise enjoyable experience by the average player's mid-game (other gameplay changes also contributed, but this is by far the dominant problem spawned by that change).  Paradox employees literally had to code in an option to control (ie, speed up) when certain galactic events might start occurring, since the game wouldn't otherwise ever get to the Mean Time to Happen point that would otherwise trigger the event.  That game basically turns your computer into a space heater now after half of a game, and Paradox is still trying to fix or at least mitigate this issue like 8 updates later.  But hey, at least you can play Stellaris on your Xbox!

Stellaris in general is actually a pretty good example of how design by committee is generally not a good idea, and a terrible terrible idea if you change the entire team a few times just for good measure.  But then again, Paradox has got shareholders to pay, so a significant portion of their poor design choices prolly stems from pressure to just sell crap as long as someone is buying (DLC model, but with "free" updates).

Fortunately, Alex is less bound by such parameters.  Just also has less money and employees...
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Megas

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Re: Calculating the Population Size of the Core Sector
« Reply #39 on: May 18, 2021, 04:36:44 PM »

Starsector can handle more than 500 (even with an old computer), unless maybe all ships are carriers (which are now relatively low-tier ships not worth using late-game in this release).

If map size will not be raised, then fleets need to be shrunk to what they were in the pre-0.7a days.  None of this capital (and now officer) spam.  But if capital spam stays, along with high DP cost ships like Ziggurat and Paragon, then map size should be raised to at least 500, preferably 600 or maybe 800.  And PPT raised across the board.  PPT has more-or-less stayed the same as in the 0.6a days when the biggest fleet was Hegemony System Defense Fleet, no bigger than a 200k bounty.

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.
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ElPresidente

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Re: Calculating the Population Size of the Core Sector
« Reply #40 on: May 18, 2021, 11:40:05 PM »

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.
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Orochi

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Re: Calculating the Population Size of the Core Sector
« Reply #41 on: May 19, 2021, 01:43:58 AM »

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.
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ElPresidente

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Re: Calculating the Population Size of the Core Sector
« Reply #42 on: May 19, 2021, 05:13:11 AM »

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.

That's AFRICA.
Population growth is very variable and also depends on culture, pollution, overpopulation, general atmosphere of society (hope)


Quote
You all seem to forget that when the going gets tough, humans screw like rabbits. The worse conditions are, the more children people have.

Only sometimes.
Look at Europe - it's falling apart, and people AREN'T effing like rabbits. But that's politics, so let's not go there.
I do agree that the Persean sector could use more population. Current number is too low, even acounting for the Collapse.
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Megas

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Re: Calculating the Population Size of the Core Sector
« Reply #43 on: May 19, 2021, 05:57:17 AM »

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.
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.
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runetrantor

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Re: Calculating the Population Size of the Core Sector
« Reply #44 on: June 03, 2021, 11:20:57 PM »

Quote
Look at Europe - it's falling apart, and people AREN'T effing like rabbits. But that's politics, so let's not go there.

Not only politics. There have been studies that show that the more educated people (And specially the women) are, the less children they have, as seen in many first world regions of Earth where they tend towards 1 child, sometimes 2, sometimes none. 

By that consideration, we could argue some worlds in the sector have low replenishment rates, the ones that are nicer to live in and we could imagine have colleges and other such 'luxuries'. 
On the other hand, we see a TON of worlds where the text we get from them depicts them rather bad to live in, or downright dystopian, like in Syndria's case where its a crowded mess of underground habitats. 

So I can imagine there are worlds in the sector that are more akin to Africa in terms of reproduction rates, than to Europe.
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