I hope you get better.
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What do you mean by “DC”?
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Difficulty Class. It’s a term from D&D, and it is a number you have to beat with a 20 sided die + bonuses.
So for example a DC 15 means I have to roll a 15 or higher to succeed, about 25% odds, if I have a +5 bonus it’s 50%.
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Hm. So I suppose Twilight would need to figure out where the best to put the values of the various difficulties at?
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Alright, population rules are up! Managed to get em done on the plane, let me know what y’all think
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Isn’t migration also a major player in a populace’s shaping?
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Migration is more of a player directed thing, dependent on mobility. It might affect the morale system when I make it, not sure, but the rules currently can handle migratory and nomadic groups, they’d just have to evolve a different Innovation path homewise
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By the way, you said the pop growth will be exponential, does that suggest the game will only cover “development periods” before population aging became a serious problem?
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I should probably change the wording, I more meant that as population increases, the rate of reproduction will obviously increase because there is a larger pool of population to reproduce. It will steady out based on lifespan, but your population will be dynamically growing instead of growing by “100 pop/round” or something
It also won’t exclusively cover those periods, but the game starts as civilizations only have stone tools and fire (or equivalent technologies if those aren’t compatible with their race
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So for instance it would be “1.2x per round”?
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Not exactly, it would be a fluctuating percentage based on current mature population, reproductive rate, available sustenance, morale, available area, environmental suitability, size, any relevant innovations, and population cohesion.
But generally, it would look like that yes, just the number would change per round based on many other minor factors
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And those calculations would be species specific and not entire-pop-specific right
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Calculations would be species specific yeah, with the sum of those being your overall juvenile gain
Any ideas for disadvantages for being small?
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Shorter lifespan could have such effects as there being little scientific progress since the specimens wouldn’t be able to read all the pre-required things without it taking a good part of their lives.
That makes sense, but I think the limitation on population growth is enough. I don’t want more disadvantages for civilizations that choose to have shorter lifespans, just more disadvantages for short races, as right now mechanically it is ideal to pick them
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I am sure there’s enough time to figure out how to balance this properly
Instead of giving more debuffs to small species give more buffs to large species.
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While that’s an option, don’t like that either. That just switches the encouragement from being small to being Large
Ideally, I would have a sliding scale, meaning “normal” (ie human) size is a neutral position, with further up or down having scaling advantages and disadvantages
Side note, I need to update the rules draft at some point from a number based system to a percentage based system for statistics
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What would be the size limits by the way
I think there is a point that can be focused on and not many people address regarding the disadvantage of small: emergent.
This small property, which is a mysterious physical law that says that new properties are created when they are together - for example, water molecules alone do not do anything, but when they are together, they create moisture.
The smaller the body, the more it actually faces different physical laws that are created as a result of emergent:
First of all - the cube law: small species are less resistant to cold because they release heat faster to the environment, so you will not find small species at the poles without having undergone serious adaptation such as in tree frogs or Belgica antarctica (the Antarctic fly).
Second - the nature of water - above a certain threshold, the environment starts to behave strangely and becomes increasingly difficult to move in - water is a prime example. Because of the strong gravitational forces, if you are, for example, a mouse, the physical forces of water cause that when you get out of water, some of the water remains on your body and with it makes it difficult for you to move (figuratively - it’s like getting out of a bathtub with 8 liter bottles of water on you) and if you are an insect - if you have no way to deal with the gravitational forces of water, you can be swallowed into the drop that behaves like jelly and simply be trapped inside it and suffocate.
Not to mention that if you even get down to a smaller size, even the air starts to behave like jelly and so like the ‘fairy fly’ and insect wings look different compared to birds and bats because they actually deal with a different layer of physical law.
Third - Cognitive capacity - This is a bit strange at first glance, but this is another point that is not addressed much when it comes to the little ones, but it simply makes a lot of sense: how small do neuron cells have to be without losing their normal function of conducting transitions that is carried out by changing the membrane voltage? Our intelligence is built on two things - brain-to-body ratio and neuronal connections/density. If one of these data is high, should it indicate intelligence or even sapience? If that’s true, I would say that the sperm whale is the smartest on Earth, but that’s certainly not what actually happens. Hey, even mice were at a similar level, having a brain-to-body ratio similar to that of a human. So what’s missing and different? Neural connections indicate the ability to make connections and increase general performance, but they also have a physiological limit due to the size of the creature.
The smallest creature with a large brain and brain connections can reach a minimal impact distance before it can cause transient disruption as a result of signal material transfers or involuntary charging (I won’t go into the biophysical details of this, but this is what happens when there is a cardiac disorder caused by a disruption of the natural pacemaker).
In short - there is a limit to how small you can be and be intelligent at the same time. So ants, even though they invented agriculture before humans, still haven’t exactly discovered fire because their overall brain capacity isn’t quite capable of accommodating all the connections needed without causing a short circuit.
This law actually exists in computer processors - Moore’s law - how small can we shrink the transmitters before the physical law prevents the electrons from functioning as they should? It’s the same for neurons if you compare them.
These are three possible reasons to limit and disadvantage small races in my opinion.
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