Concept #1: Population & Citizens
Part 1: Citizen Types
SMAC is a successor to Civ2 and it copies Civ’s happy-content-unhappy mechanic. Civ simulates the happiness of a population. If you have an unhappy population you entertain them with a coliseum and thereby make them content. If you too many unhappy citizens, they riot, thereby shutting down their city.
It’s not a bad mechanic but it would be so much more interesting to explore the concept of citizen talent or skill. In this scheme, workers represent the competent and reliable portion of the population. Drones, in contrast, represent the low talent portion of the population that is a net drain of resources. Finally, talents represent the high end of skill; genius level innovators and maintainers.
In game, drones no longer cause riots. Instead, they simply do not work tiles. Each drone eats two nutrients and one energy per turn. In addition, drones deplete one point of research per turn, since they represent dysfunction in society.
Workers can work tiles as normal. They may not be turned into specialists. Instead, each worker may be turned into an urban worker which means he does not work a tile in the base radius but instead produces +3 energy. The point of this mechanic is to allow workers to contribute when they are not needed to work tiles. Each worker in the city eats two nutrients per turn.
Talents can work tiles in the same way as workers but this should be avoided if possible as it is a waste of their abilities. The true potential of a talent is that he can be flipped to make a specialist (Technician, Engineer, Doctor, Empath, Librarian, Thinker, Transcend). Specialists will be more powerful than in vanilla. If you have a talent, you will want to flip him. Each talent (including specialists) eats two nutrients per turn.
Part 2: Population Dynamics
SMAC copies the Civ pattern of growth: a city grows when it stockpiles enough food. Very malthusian. Useful for historical simulation but not so much for representing an advanced technological society. The barrier to growth in real life contemporary technologically advanced societies isn’t lack of food. It’s that people don’t have a lot of children. TFR (total fertility rate) represents the average number of children each woman has over her lifetime.
The social engineering factor GROWTH would be rearranged to represent TFR. A base would grow not when it has stockpiled enough food but when a mathematical formula calculates that enough time has elapsed for new citizens to be born. Of course, there is no separate representation of children/adolescents, so “born” is an abstraction that also represents “matured.”
Each citizen represents 1,000 colonists. In the original game, each citizen represents 10,000 colonists but that adds up to the U.N.S.S. Unity transporting a minimum of 80,000 passengers and I personally find a lower number to be more plausible. These numbers are important and not just academic insofar as they influence population growth. A population of 80,000 will grow its first 1,000 much faster than a population of 8,000!
But, before we get into that, let’s look into another related concept: senility. Your citizens will get old and die. If growth represents TFR, the senility mechanic will be necessary to accurately model population. Clicking on a citizen in the city menu will show his age. We can imagine that each citizen starts at 20 and lives to 70. That’s 50 years before he vanishes. This has a lot of gameplay implications, so please follow closely.
We can imagine that citizens retire at age 60. That means workers and talents turn into drones. Now you might think it’s not fair that a formerly productive citizen should bestow the same negative penalty to research as a drone who has been part of the underclass his whole life but we can justify this on the basis of institutional conservatism. In real life history, we see old generals who don’t adopt to new ways of war, old scientists who refuse to accept new ways of thinking, elderly middle class persons who can’t grasp new social paradigms, etc.
However, senility is not an absolute value. Various factors might increase or decrease senility. A Base with high senility can have low TFR and reasonable long term growth. If you are able to keep your workers productive until age 90, you have gained that many more years of productive work. In addition, the senility stat represents not just lifespan but also health, fertility and other related concepts, so it can itself affect TFR. If, through technological means, women can remain fertile until, say, 80, instead of the current real world value which is closer to 40, then it is only natural we might expect more children.
Note that senility is a value that affects bases and individual citizens. It is not Faction-wide. Factions attempt to influence senility through facilities like the Research Hospital, through specialists like a Doctor, or even through special projects like the Longevity Vaccine.
Note that one of the implications of senility is that specific citizens will get old and die. That means you stand to lose your workers and specialists if you cannot replace them. I think it is also reasonable that talents are locked into specific specialist tiers. Once you make a talent a Doctor, you can never make him an Empath, although you can switch him back to working a tile if necessary.
We envision the Factions of Planet as highly mobile societies, with individual citizens moving from city to city for work or other reasons. They are not like medieval peasants who never go ten miles from the place of their birth. As such, the GROWTH/TFR calculation produces new citizens based on the total population of the faction, not individually for each base. Also, new citizens tend to appear in the bases that are major population centers, not in your smaller locations. What we’re thinking about here is urbanization. Consider the Baltics: Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia. The entire population is uprooting from the towns and villages to live in the one or two major cities in each country.
As SMAC Faction leader, this is a problem. Deirdre does not want one Gaia’s Landing megacity where her entire population is concentrated and neither do the other Faction leaders but the individual citizens face strong urbanization pressures. The in-game solution is a special settler unit (distinct from the colony pod). The settler represents the state funneling resources to relocate citizens from the major urban centers to smaller bases of strategic or future economic importance. In-game, the settler cannot build new bases. He can only join existing bases but he is, naturally, much cheaper to produce than a colony pod. You can choose which specific citizens you wish to load onto a settler. You might use him to relocate your drones to a non-productive containment base or you might want to concentrate your talents. It would be a strategic choice.
Also, consider the implication of population loss, perhaps by mindworms. They might eat your drones, as in vanilla, but they might also eat your workers or talents.
Part 3: Nutrients and Starvation
Bases no longer stockpile nutrients. Bases can even grow if they lack sufficient nutrients to feed the new population, though this will result in the immediate starvation of citizens. Starvation may trigger riots which are considerably more serious than in vanilla (to be addressed later) but bases automatically borrow excess nutrients from friendly bases with a freight connection if they would otherwise starve.
