The Personnel Touch - Development Log #238

Everyone’s happy on their first day, but they might not stay that way! Fabian explains how the workforce simulation will take it easy in the beginning while you spruce up your infrastructure.

Michi (molp)

We simulate the planet’s population growth and decline every seven days. Every type of workforce grows and declines depending on the fulfillment of their needs. After a simulation is finished all inhabitants of a planet get a notification leading to the population report. Below is an early work-in-progress screenshot of that report.

As you can see the current population and the change over the last seven days period is the most important information . The happiness of a workforce depends on the fulfillment of its needs, the current unemployment rate and the happiness of previous periods is also taken into account.

A large unemployment rate is an indicator that the population exceeds the workforce requirements of the bases’ production lines. A low unemployment rate is desirable, a non-existing one might lead to a situation where not every base gets the workforces they requested.

Fabian (Counterpoint)

Last week I jumped back into Michi’s “population simulation tool”, experimented with certain setups of workforces and infrastructure and created a bunch of charts given different starting situations. My intention was mostly to develop a feel for how planetary populations may develop in-game over the weeks (even though there are a whole bunch of additional and more dynamic factors that’ll come into play in “real life”). In general, the model works and is able to reasonably handle and respond to a variety of situations. I took note of a few things I’d like to keep an eye on in our further development and tests though, such as the in many situations rather slow speed of engineer and scientist growth, or the generally very moderate decline of unhappy workforces (and especially pioneers). The latter is intended to an extent of course, also because we don’t want to cut down super harshly on existing planetary workforces in our pretty “mature” universe.

Speaking of which, some players have been worried that they’ll lose massive amounts of workers once Populous hits. Rest assured that this is very much on our radar and we will make sure there’s enough of a “transitioning phase” so you can get the new infrastructure up and running in time. On that note, we do have a mechanism in our concept called “Explorer’s Grace”, which adds a pretty significant bonus to a population’s happiness for a good while if they’re settling on a previously untouched planet. So one option would be to just apply this bonus to all inhabited planets initially when we release the update. Of course, this mechanism also hints at a potential future of the game including actual “exploration” with super cool planets to discover far from where you start out and all that.

Anyways, that’s far-future stuff. The rest of last week was about starting my research on closer-future post-Populous things though, which I’ll continue this week as well.

Nick

Last week I was able to conduct a few surveys with players for my “Player Psychology” project and have gotten some really interesting results. I shared my first findings with the team and we all agreed that so far it sounds very spot on for many of our PrUn players. I will be looking at more data and compiling into one coherent paragraph detailing many traits and behaviors of our “Ideal PrUn Player.” Thanks again to those of you that volunteered; I couldn’t have done it without you guys!

I hope you guys are following us on social media, like on Twitter, because there’s been a few cool postings and more to come! I finalized the Release Roadmap and Prosperous Turnip logo, which I think both turned out really well. I will be posting more frequently thanks to the logo and this week I’ll start on the Montem image (the poll winner!). If you guys have any interesting facts/stories about Montem, send me a message and I might be able to incorporate something into the image.

As always: We’d love to hear what you think. Join us on Discord or the forums!

Happy trading!

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