um, I don't mean to open a can of worms here, just hoping that IF what I spotted here is a valid problem, then we can work on a viable solution for it:
As elaborated in the gamespot interview:
The Drengin Empire is a vile, evil, nasty civilization bent on enslaving the entire galaxy.
In Dark Avatar, they are the good guys. The alternative to the Drengin are the Korath, a splinter group of the Drengin Empire who have gained power and are starting to dominate the empire. They want the rest of the galaxy exterminated outright. So, the campaign focuses on thwarting the Korath's plans to exterminate everyone else. Conquest and oppression: good. Genocide: bad. You just have to know where to draw the line. |
According to my understanding, isn't
every planetary invasion is a genocide in itself? Thus the only non-genocidal way to conquer as how the game is now would be through cultural conquest, or when the planet surrenders to you...
There is one "escape argument" that we can use to counter this invasion==genocide argument, is that the population number represented only those soldier-worthy, tax-paying citizens, thus excluding old people, young kids, housewives and whatnot. To me, yes it makes sense in a stretch, but seems too convenient, as anything that is not included in the gameplay can be explained away as anything.
If we want to do "remedial actions" instead of "explaining away", here are some ideas that i thought up... yeah, they require more work on the devs part, but maybe their addition might actually make the gameplay more fun, who knows?
SOLDIERING
Lets have two separate figures for the population, one for "soldier-worthy", and another for normal citizens... Soldiers are converted from the normal citizens thru "barracks/training camp" type of planetary buildings... with more/higher quality barracks increasing the number of pops getting converted to soldiers per turn. When invading a planet, only these soldiers are counted for battles, while the rest of the planet's citizens are left unharmed.
to make it an interesting twist, lets make the soldier-worthy ones exempt from tax, since their contribution for the empire is to die gloriously for its cause. This creates an intriguing balancing question, as to how much soldiers do we need to defend/use for conquering vs impact on planetary economy... and idling soldiers is indeed bad for economy.
In times of peace, we can convert the barracks buildings back to other types to reduce numbers of idle soldiers and increase tax income... even though decommissioning is instant vs construction, and thus converting back to citizens is instantenous vs training em to soldiers, it still makes sense because it IS easier in real life for a soldier to become a normal citizen than the other way around.
We can have Soldiering bonus to affect the rate of soldier recruiting per turn on top of the barracks conversion figures.
As to how well can the AI use this, lets see:
by default:
1) Altarians being a peaceful civ, will have only a small percentage of its citizens converted to soldiers, unless the need arises for more.
2) Drengin, being warmongers, will strive to maximize its standing army.
3) Korx, being the ultimate mercenaries, will readily sell its own soldier-filled troop transports to others.
in anticipation of an invasion:
1) a civ will rush build lots of barracks to prepare its defending army, or
2) transfer soldiers from safe planets to the threatened planet, or
3) thru a clever twist in the existing gameplay mechanism, purchase soldier-filled troop ships from other civs to bolster their own soldier pops.
SLAVERY
To simulate the concept of slavery, we can also introduce another subgroup of a planets population: the slaves
- slaves don't pay taxes, but they add bonus to planetary production (social & military), lets say 1 pt production in each category per 1 million slaves.
- when conquering planets, the invader can choose whether the citizens are to be left as taxpayers, or to be converted to slaves, with perhaps a slider percentage for how many of each. Drengin will naturally opt heavily in favor of slavery choice, adjusted of course by their need to balance their income. Or for the genocidal Korath and like-minded civ, there is the "wipe em all out" option as well...
- the more percentage of slaves there are on a planet vs normal citizens, the the harder it is to mantain morale, and the likelier it is for the planet to rebel. Loyalty is also diminished with a majority slaved planet. To counter this effect, secret police centers can be built.
- since good civs shouldnt by right have slaves, we can adapt to this by good civs having an additional expense to its income per slave capita, i.e. instead of slaves, they have labor workers who are being paid in wages. neutral civ may incur less wage per labor capita.
- Good civs has a special building project, "slave rehabilitation centers" which converts slave population into normal taxpaying citizens, with better centers converting more slaves per turn.
Thus we finally have an extra advantage of choosing a good alignment, as we can get more tax income from freed slaves.
- Evil civ, on the other hand, have the "slave recruitment ctrs" special buildings, with opposite effect, and with a morale penalty to the planet it is built (no citizen wants to be converted to a slave, right?).
- These special buildings are not super projects, they are just like neutral's neutrality learning ctr, so they balance up now that each ethical alignment have their own reproducible special buildings.
- we can transport slaves between planets using a slaver module on ships... (with the corresponding adjustments of colony module now only carry taxpaying citizens and troop module carrying only soldiers)
-perhaps this is unnecessary, but interesting to consider nevertheless: Due to harsh working conditions, slaves will continuously die out a set number per turn... this creates an urgency for slave-dependent empires to seek out sources of fresh slaves... to keep conquering & enslaving new planets... also creates an urgency for the good civs to quickly upgrade slaves to normal citizens before too much die out and thus lose potential taxpayers. Also, heh heh heh, it means, slaves don't last long in a neutral civ, coz they dont have any slave-increasing buildings... they have to either conquer others to get fresh slaves in batches, or conquer evil civ planets to get the slave-production capabilities and cart newly converted slaves over to their own neutral planets...
-we can make slaves as a trade-able currency just like BCs and IPs... but this removes the urgency of the previous idea of slaves dying out. This can actually be done without needing extra coding! How: park a slaver ship in orbit of your planet, and sell the ship. The slave population of that planet will automatically get transferred to the full capacity of the slaver ship. This is similar to existing mechanism of buying troop transports: When you buy troop transports from another civ that is parked on their planet, you get it filled to the brim by troops from the planet it is orbiting.
