Limit Populations = Food

[palandus]

As suggested in a previous thread by Galileus (http://ludeon.com/forums/index.php?topic=1520.0), using food to limit population growth rather than having fixed limits based on storytellers.

How this could work out is having food over time decompose and disappear (rotting effect). Different foods could rot at different rates. Normal grown potatoes could rot within 3 days. Hydroponic potatoes could rot within 1 day (due to being grown so fast that they aren't able to resist disease and infection as well as a normally grown potato would). Any food stored in a Food Dispenser would rot at a much slower rate (say 5 days), but would have limited storage space for food supplies (stored food would be in the form of nutrient paste; say 100 units of food or 10 nutrient meals [10 food = 1 nutrient paste without research]). This would have an added benefit that nutrient paste dispensers would only need to be restocked every once in a while rather than have colonists haul food from storage to it every time they want a meal.

This could be potentially useful once cooking or other ways of preparing food is introduced. A food dispenser could store food supplies the longest but would always grant a debuff for eating nutrient paste. Whereas making it in different ways (ie a Oven Baked Potato) would grant positive buffs for eating it but would rot faster than raw food.

Having food decompose, would naturally limit your ability to sustain a larger colony. This way you also will not be able to forever sit on a large pile of food forever; you have to be constantly producing more to replace it. So instead of having a fixed limit of 13 or so colonists, your true population cap would be based on how many mouths you can feed with your food production without starvation setting in.

[Galileus]

Actually it's from here: http://ludeon.com/forums/index.php?topic=1583.0

Anyway, I'll sit down and pick it apart sometime tomorrow. The basis for it to work is:

- With rotting food you're not able to stock up. It seems obvious, but it has a side-effect - food becomes an income that has limited storage, and thus needs to have reserved colonists. In other words, per X colonists, you loose Y for food manufacturing. This effect should have diminishing returns.
- Rot should be able to take over fresh food in the same stockpile. That means bigger colony means need of more stockpiles to minimize the risks. This in turn leads to harder maintenance.
- With bigger production lines (processing food for quality), higher quality products should rot faster. To show player right out of the gates how it works, it should start right at first processed food - with it would come the need for better storages, made specifically for food.
- Special stockpiles can be additionally balanced to ensure diminishing returns - for example, to create a N-tiles refrigeration storage, you would need N^(1+N/100) refrigeration units. This means 2x2 refrigerator would be self sustained (4 tiles need 4^1,04=4,22~~4.0 R Units), 3x3 would need one external unit, 4x4 - 8 external units, and 5x5 a whooping 30 external units. Add the restriction of one external unit being able to be build only next to another external unit OR a single storage, and the more food you produce, the faster you waste the space.

[Untrustedlife]

I actually suggested this here:

http://ludeon.com/forums/index.php?topic=1583.0

a few days ago.

Not as much detail though on my thread.

[GC13]

Using food to limit population size does nothing unless there is a limit to how many food-growing operations we can build. Historically, that means arable land.

If hydroponics are in the game, then you're stuck with one of two situations: either a colonist can be at least productive enough with a table to feed themselves, in which case you're only limited by the metal it takes to build the hydroponics setup, or they can't, in which case hydroponics are useless.

[Galileus]

If hydroponics are in the game, then you're stuck with one of two situations: either a colonist can be at least productive enough with a table to feed themselves, in which case you're only limited by the metal it takes to build the hydroponics setup, or they can't, in which case hydroponics are useless.

Or you can implement diminishing returns as I suggested ^^'

You cannot harvest non-stop (there is a growth), and so you need to store a X-days supply of food. X can be easily modified with the processed foods - and processed food can easily manipulate amount of input needed (X units per lower grade food to create Y of higher grade). Add processing time - a batch of food for processing would need to sit in machine for a time. Add refrigeration as outlined. You end up with situation, where you need to stockpile food for future every N days, and with rotting and diminishing returns on refrigerated storage, you end up with a nice, soft cap.

[GC13]

Perhaps I'm just not understanding the kind of storage you mean. Do you mean that if I have more food, then I'll lose a greater percentage of my food to spoilage? Because otherwise, it's all multiplication: 2x as many tables, means 2x as much in storage at a time, meaning 2x as much spoilage, but it's fine because you still have 2x as much food to feed your 2x colonists.

[Untrustedlife]

Perhaps I'm just not understanding the kind of storage you mean. Do you mean that if I have more food, then I'll lose a greater percentage of my food to spoilage? Because otherwise, it's all multiplication: 2x as many tables, means 2x as much in storage at a time, meaning 2x as much spoilage, but it's fine because you still have 2x as much food to feed your 2x colonists.

Stockpiles are dwarf fortreess like in the new version, (no resource bank in the sky), so we are dealing with individual food items in a stockpile here.That you can actually see in the stockpile.All taht needs to be implemented is a amount of time it takes for a piece of food to rot.
In gallieuses case, you need to build "refrigerator rooms" to hold food.

[Galileus]

It's not about loosing the food in the end, you don't need to loose anything. But pretty much yeah, the bigger the stockpile, the more food you can loose. But again, it's not about the loosing - because there is spread of rot, you need to build more stockpiles. "Well, it's still just more stockpiles!" - no. Because they need to be separate stockpiles - so 2x2 stockpile takes up 4x4 space, 5x5 stockpile takes 7x7 space. This would ramp up very quickly, and become even more visible with processed food - because then you need to keep even more food for processing. Then there comes the need to keep external refrigeration units for stockpiles - again, ramps up needed space drastically.

So to double your colonists, you need to double your production... but to double your production, you need to double the storage AND the spacing in storage AND on space needed for refrigeration... It's not visible from pure math standpoint, it seems linear, but it really ramps up amount of work you need to put into expansions - and there are your diminishing returns.

I'm looping around with it, it's way to complicated at this point. It could work, but... eeeh. There's gotta be a nicer solution. For example, change in percentages indeed - the more food you store, the more likely you'll loose more. More than linear increment I mean. I think storage problems (rot spread, refrigeration) are still good to have, but not as good if the solution itself.

Let's try like that: rot spread. Every time piece of food rots in a stockpile of at least X tiles, there is N% chance that other pieces will gain rot as well, counted for each piece individually. Each multiplication of X tiles in the storage causes calculations to run again. With double the X, you get two "runs" with the same percent. This gives you N%*X spread at minimal stockpile, N%*2X+(1-N%)2X*N% spread for double storage and N%*4X+(1-N%)4X*N%+(1-N%^2)4X*N%+(1-N%^3)4X*N% for quadra storage.

Numbers crunching:

We take X=4 (every 4 tiles of storage cause an additional rot spread calculation) and N=10% (rot spreads to 1 in 10 other pieces of food in storage).

With storage of s size:

s=4 (2x2 storage) rot takes approx. 1,4 pieces of food, spread not likely (only original taken)
s=9 (3x3 storage) rot takes approx. 2,57 pieces of food, singular spread with chance to spread again
s=16 (4x4 storage) rot takes approx. 4,37 pieces of food, spread of 3 pieces of food
s=25 (5x5 storage) rot takes approx. 9,22 pieces of food, a spread of 8

Now, you're sayin - loss rises, but so does the amount in the first place! Important thing to remember here is this is rot spread from a singular source. As storages gets bigger, the amount of rot sources will rise as well - and each source gets more dangerous, as the size of stockpile rises.

How does that sound? Except for scary and please, please stop writing numbers? I think approach like that could work much better than overblown refrigeration system - after all, everything player needs to keep in mind is that rot is bad and rot takes over bigger stockpiles more aggressively.