"Development Level >>"? Figuring out what all these numbers do.

KKomrade Sylas

KKomrade Sylas
Ian, what's your experience with system population so far?

My Coriolis once finished gave the system 15k population to start with.

I built a medium-sized agricultural odyssey settlement in an unrelated body. Population jumped to 15.500. I built a refinery hub in another unrelated body. System population jumped to 17.150. Then I built a comms installation around the same body that had the odyssey settlement, and there was no population change. I'm trying to science out what factors affect population (Security - Tech Level - Wealth - Standard of Living - Development Level)

Obviously not enough to confirm anything, but neither the refinery hub nor the comms installation had a "Population" bar. Yet the refinery hub did increase population (And it increased it more than the ody settlement which DID have a population bar).

Leads me to believe population is influenced by the factors listed above. Comms installation increased security (+1) and tech level (+3) but no change in pop. The Refinery hub reduced security (-1) and standard of living (-2) but increased Wealth (+5) and Development Level (+7).

Discarding Security, Tech Level (No increase in pop from comms installation in spite of having those), Standard of living (Reduced from Hub but pop increased anyway), it would seem population is tied to Wealth and/or Development level in particular (and also whichever asset can support population such as coriolis, outposts, ody settlements etc)

Maybe standard of living as well. Though someone from my squadron built a mining installation (+3 wealth, -2 standard of living) and the pop increased from 4k to 4800.

Seems one way to test would be to build a tier 2 medical installation in space, since it increases tech level (no pop) but also standard of living. One way to discard that one
 

Ian Doncaster

Ian Doncaster
So far I've only had time to build a starter outpost for 5k population, so I think you're way ahead on this one.

There do seem to be slightly different populations for the different starter outposts, which might be another way to do a quick check.
 

KKomrade Sylas

KKomrade Sylas
Ian Doncaster said:
So far I've only had time to build a starter outpost for 5k population, so I think you're way ahead on this one.

There do seem to be slightly different populations for the different starter outposts, which might be another way to do a quick check.
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I suppose it makes sense for me to discard Tech Level and Security as not affecting system population. Wonder if Tech Level affects certain commodities appearing or not. Security obviously affects system security, appearance of interstellar factors and response time from cops.

Leaves me with Wealth, Standard of Living and Development level as "maybe they affect population". I know they do but I do not know which is which, given my experiment with the refinery outpost (+5 wealth +7 development -2 standard of living = increased population)

Mostly I'm documenting here because you're the smart one and you might tell me if I'm saying nonsense or if there's a flaw in my testing.

My next installation will be a Relay installation (+1 security which is already discarded, and +1 development level which it isn't). If it increases population, Development level is confirmed as increasing it. If it doesn't then it's discarded.

Next after that will be medical installation (+5 standard of living + 3 tech which is already discarded). Same thing.
 

BDelacroix

BDelacroix
Ian Doncaster said:
So far I've only had time to build a starter outpost for 5k population, so I think you're way ahead on this one.

There do seem to be slightly different populations for the different starter outposts, which might be another way to do a quick check.
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Concur. The finished outpost gave me 5k pop. Commercial outpost, if someone is making a chart.
7.5k now with 1 finished refining facility and 1 finished orbital relay.
 
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Ian Doncaster

Ian Doncaster
KKomrade Sylas said:
I suppose it makes sense for me to discard Tech Level and Security as not affecting system population. Wonder if Tech Level affects certain commodities appearing or not. Security obviously affects system security, appearance of interstellar factors and response time from cops.
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Tech Level probably at least affects Outfitting/Shipyard quality.

BDelacroix said:
Concur. The finished outpost gave me 5k pop. Commercial outpost, if someone is making a chart.
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Interesting. Mine is Industrial - so the Industrial's +2 Dev, +3 Tech is equivalent to the Commercial's +2 Wealth, +5 Living.

I've certainly seen new systems at <5k so I wonder what station type they're using.
Conversely the Scientific and Military have "Initial population" listed too.

(With the distinction between "Initial population" and "Max population" I wonder if there's also some general increase in population over time, or triggered by some other causes?)
 

KKomrade Sylas

KKomrade Sylas
Ian Doncaster said:
(With the distinction between "Initial population" and "Max population" I wonder if there's also some general increase in population over time, or triggered by some other causes?)
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My guess (and yeah this is a guess not a confirmation) is that stations have a starting pop (Say 15k for the coriolis) and a maximum pop (Pulling this out of my crack, 1 million, just to say) and other factors such as wealth etc... increase the population of the already existing assets.

Makes sense to me since the hub has no population bar yet it increased population.

Also if you really want to have a lot of population, the big planetary ports look like the way to go.


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Factabulous

Factabulous
Col 285 Sector MM-A b15-8 has a single Industrial outpost and 4k pop. But it is a bit weird as it is apparently complete, but I can't dock - so might just be broken.
 

Disemboweled Ego

D
Ian Doncaster said:
(And a "Contraband" system economy influence doesn't make much sense with either theory, since that's not an economy type...)
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I take the contraband economy to mean that it makes the normal economy (able to?) produce the illegal goods of that economy unless banned by the government (booze for agri, performance enhancers for high tech etc). Dunno how relevant this is to people who don't anarchy BGS and don't often end up doing missions requiring those goods, but they can be annoying to source due to lower availability.

The main bits of info I'm getting from this thread are:
  • The chevrons are not exact numbers, the exact numbers are not available anywhere and things that show the same number of chevrons in the same area might actually differ. Not surprising that it's deliberately obtuse, but still disappointing.
  • The overall game here seems to be balancing your system so that you build stuff to increase the various sliders that improve the system overall while dealing with the downsides and keeping the economy/economies where you want.
 

Markov Chaney

M
Disemboweled Ego said:
I take the contraband economy to mean that it makes the normal economy (able to?) produce the illegal goods of that economy unless banned by the government (booze for agri, performance enhancers for high tech etc). Dunno how relevant this is to people who don't anarchy BGS and don't often end up doing missions requiring those goods, but they can be annoying to source due to lower availability.

The main bits of info I'm getting from this thread are:
  • The chevrons are not exact numbers, the exact numbers are not available anywhere and things that show the same number of chevrons in the same area might actually differ. Not surprising that it's deliberately obtuse, but still disappointing.
Click to expand...

I don't think it's even an indication of numbers as an approximation, it is an indication of the trend or pressure that building the asset would create. If you build 5 assets with big ol' trends towards Tech and you build a Refinery or three, you should get a High Tech / Refinery or Refinery / High Tech.

Conversely if you don't build any of the more piratical or grey market type assets, your system will stay pretty clean and you won't be able to trade in Personal Weapons and all that.

My wild theory is that these trends are already in the model and the way we get the NPC stations we had already are interactions between Stellar Forge and however the BGS was originally seeded, so this just exposes it.

But these are all weights and trends and nudges, not "build one of these to gain 2,500 pop."

I have a feeling Stellar Forge is still a factor here and that explains some of the people in the megathread trying to figure out why their Refinery won't refine: there's nothing or very little to refine on the body they've deployed it on and you can't nudge your way out of that by building more facilities that simply don't have any inputs to work on.

Disemboweled Ego said:
  • The overall game here seems to be balancing your system so that you build stuff to increase the various sliders that improve the system overall while dealing with the downsides and keeping the economy/economies where you want.
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Yes, that would be...a CMS. Funny that. ;-) It seems obtuse because the micromanagement has been deliberately kept out of it, otherwise ED will slowly turn into the other FDev CMS games.

As it is, things will fly for systems that make a bit of sense in the context of their surroundings and won't fly if they don't, and for things like "Black Market or nah" which are pretty independent of the geography, you can nudge that by choosing what Facilities to build.
 

Ian Doncaster

Ian Doncaster
Markov Chaney said:
Conversely if you don't build any of the more piratical or grey market type assets, your system will stay pretty clean and you won't be able to trade in Personal Weapons and all that.
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Though for other systems, what commodities are available at a major settlement are generally solely a function of the economy types and the government type. If the government bans Personal Weapons, you can't trade them. If the government is a Social type it'll open a black market so you can.

Odyssey settlements have a much more restricted sale set, so there's perhaps more room for unusual influences there.

Markov Chaney said:
My wild theory is that these trends are already in the model and the way we get the NPC stations we had already are interactions between Stellar Forge and however the BGS was originally seeded, so this just exposes it.
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A lot of the parameters have certainly been around for a while, because they got mentioned in some of the old Galnet BGS news articles. I suspect in at least some cases a normal system has them set proportional to the system population.

https://elite.drinkybird.net/?guid=59b266761909e7325b548918 (Expansion reduces wealth and development level)
https://elite.drinkybird.net/?guid=59b2658c1909e7430627b707 (Civil war reduces security, standard of living, development level ... while War reduces security, wealth and development level)
https://elite.drinkybird.net/?guid=59b8f888a1337640e964195c (Famine and Outbreak both reduce standard of living)
https://elite.drinkybird.net/?guid=59b7aefe11cdd42ea56c9652 (Lockdown increases security and decreases wealth; Civil Unrest decreases wealth and standard of living)
https://elite.drinkybird.net/?guid=59b6603711cdd4364f674aee (Boom increases wealth; Bust decreases it)

All of those of course predate the 3.3 BGS reforms and so may no longer apply. The security level changes are observable and don't seem to have changed, though.

Wealth acting as a multiplier on commodity supply/demand levels is possible, given that; it would explain most of the "standard" effects of Boom, War, Expansion, etc. on the markets. Possibly the others do as well, but for different classes of goods.

Tech level presumably affects outfitting (that's what it did in the three previous games...) but given just how opaque outfitting is I doubt we'll ever get better than a vague handwave on that.

(This does mean that attempts to pin down what these values do will need to be careful to control for station owner states. I'm starting to rebuild my state effect database for the 4.1 markets, but it's probably safer to try to keep State: None if you don't need another one for something)
 

Eolh89

Eolh89
Is it not possible for security and wealth to modify the sliders? The sliders in the new systems are very different from the classic ones. I've noticed that the security slider became increasingly 'normalized' as I built facilities that increased security.
 

Kzak

Kzak
Initial population for my Coriolis was 17k. Building one Tier 1 (Medium) military settlement got that increased to 17,450 souls, although a day has passed since I finished it. We'll have to check if population increases over time on its own.
 

Eolh89

Eolh89
Kzak said:
Initial population for my Coriolis was 17k. Building one Tier 1 (Medium) military settlement got that increased to 17,450 souls, although a day has passed since I finished it. We'll have to check if population increases over time on its own.
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I think so, I think the population increases day by day. Otherwise, the values of 'initial population increase' and 'max population increase' would make little sense.
 
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