Food/Population Idea

Perhaps if natural population growth was slowed down, farms and food production could be used to make your population grow faster.

So are you proposing that the devs edit how the population is handled in-game? As far as worthless, yes a planet with a high population is susceptible to morale issues, but that is why I already make these my default colonizer/transport worlds. I let the pop get huge (love those multiple food bonus tiles on a PQ22 world) and let them get large enough to ferry off a few 7000 capacity transports. Usually two of these are suffice to bring the morale back to 100% and it doesn't take long to rebuild the population.

That's what I do currently, but sometimes you don't need to be producing so many transports. If you 'forget' a world for a while your approval rating will be affected. It also creates the problem of unpredictable taxes if you deplete too many worlds at once.

The way I imagined it, "troop" worlds would produce something closer to the average taxes. You wouldn't need such a high population, so the high-income level would be reduced, and it would recharge more quickly, raising the low-income level. It wouldn't prevent the need to be careful, but it allows for easier managing of your economy. I think habitat zones would also need to be quite expensive to maintain.

Good point Evil Muppet, good point. Micromanaging doesn't bother me too much and I usually just tend to use the colony manager screen for pretty much everything. Yes, there are times that I may miss a planet or two, but I try not to sweat it. Probably helps that I never use any other government than the default "dictatorship". I know what I am missing out on by keeping an archaic government in place, but it helps with morale and since I usually go for a conquest victory, anyone who gets out of line finds themselves shipped to the front lines. That's why I enjoy playing as an evil race, ethics don't have to be factor in make believe!

Yeah, evil rocks. I pretty much stick to conquest myself.

That's another reason for my suggestion, because I find it easy to mass produce transports when required and steamroll through the AI's worlds. I think the player would have to be more careful to balance their production if planets had to 'recharge' more often. You would need to produce a slow and steady stream of transports, instead of rushing a massive invasion fleet. The AI doesn't seem to react well to that.

... I am reminded of a little game from a short-lived developer named Techtonics for Interplay Games. It was called Star Reach, and it was one of the most kick-ass games I ever played. It was so much fun.

Anyway, one of the elements of the game was that there were 'troop units' generated on a planet at regular intervals- the timer for which is seen when you go to build a Troop Ship or a Marauder (basically a Combat Transport- it was armed with a viciously deadly missile weapon, but it was very expensive and difficult to pull together a fleet of them in order to practically guarantee success in an invasion). These 'Troops' were separate from the Population, and determined how many times the planet could be invaded, as well as how often troop ships could be built and deployed (or stored in a Starport to prepare them for Fleet deployment).

Anyway, interesting idea. And you should check out Star Reach - can be found among abandonware. It's a fairly nice hybrid of 4X, RTS, and Shooter (Yes, I said Shooter. Play it to understand why) - at least in the opinion of myself and my father, as we played it together for quite awhile after the Beta discs came in.

In dark avatar we now will get troops instead of just using civilians.