Hmm so what you're proposing is that committing widespread genocide across your empire isn't easy enough?

Okay, so, I haven't played in a while, and so I don't know what changes have already been made, but I assume that it is still the case that when you take a planet, the ratio of the NW of your empire and family to the NW of the empire whose planet you take and their family determines whether or not you capture the infra, blow the infra but still capture the planet, or blow the entire planet requiring you to send an explo, and this is a long sentence - I think my attempt at parodying Trump (in other thread) damaged my brain.

And I'm also assuming it is still the case, that even in cases when you capture a planet with infra intact, the pop is destroyed.  What I am suggesting by aspect 1 above, therefore, is to simply allow the pop not to be killed off by default when you take a planet of an empire and family within 75% of your empire's and family's NW (also possible for inter-fam swaps).  And so, when you capture said planet with pop and infra intact, just as you currently have the option to dismantle infra when you expect the planet to be retaken by the enemy, you should also have the option to kill-off the pop on that planet.  This is all I am suggesting by aspect 1.  The question is why is this a benefit?  Well, there are many possible applications...

Basically, when taking a planet / planets there are 2 options:

Option #1:  You don't expect to hold the planets you are taking and intend to do retakes, and so the reason you are taking the planets is to inflict damage on the enemy.  And so be really nasty cause as much damage you kill of the pop and raze the infra. (By the way, if aspect 1 is implemented, it should be made possible to kill the pop and keep the infra intact.)

Being nasty like this, essentially committing genocide against the enemy's pop, should come with it a penalty, specifically to your the empire's morale, or perhaps raising your enemy's morale, or both.  This makes sense: your empire's own people and military don't like committing genocide and thus your empire's morale suffers for it, while the enemy's empire is outraged by your committing genocide and is spurned to more willingness to fight!

Option #2:  Other times, you want to keep the planet, and intend to defend it, get a portal up, integrate it into your empire, INCLUDING the pop.  In that case, your empire should get morale boost.  How to set this up? Well, there's a lot to consider...

Other times when you might want to kill-off your own empire's pop: say your fam is losing a system, and you all agree you want to implement a scorched earth policy, destroying all the infra and pop so the enemy fam can't benefit as much from taking the system.  This should affect your empire's morale, but not as badly as when committing genocide on a newly taken planet.  So, it could be set up that the longer you have held a planet, the less morale loss inflicted if you kill-off the pop on that planet. 

Ideally, another option might be implemented where you can 'evacuate pop' to other systems, filling up pop on your planets in other systems.  In this case, you might face no morale loss at all (if there is room for more pop on other planets in your empire, otherwise, they essentially get killed and negatively affect your empire's morale).  Evacuating pop would be a viable option for players who don't intend to keep planets that they've taken but don't want to suffer morale loss of simply wiping them out and have room on other planets for more pop.  They might evacuate the pop of planets they've just taken to their own planets instead of killing-off pop which would thus not affect their empire's morale as badly.

Implications: how will the race of the pop you're evacuating or integrating into your empire affect your empire's bonuses?  Example, say you are Quantam and you take a bunch of planets populated by Revalons, and integrate their pop into your empire.  Does your empire's income bonus get adjusted up and your science bonus get adjusted down, according to the ratio of Quantams to Revalons now in your empire?  What if you take a bunch of pop planets of Wardancers early in the game such that your selected race essentially becomes a minority in your empire?  How does it affect your empire's morale when 'ruling' race is a minority race in your own empire?  Is there a mixing of the races over time?  Does everyone essentially become a custom race?  How might ops / spells be affected?  How can the game keep track of what would become a huge additional number variables to compute?

Nice.  Sounds good!  I suggested the two aspects as starters, foundational things to be tested-out.

As mentioned, game dynamics could be changed dramatically, whereby, yes, there would be utilitarian purpose in wiping-out entire systems of pop all at once.  Additionally, I assume there will still be a tendency for a fam's main attacker to pass planets and kill-off his pop to lower NW before a fleet jump, unless, of course, something like what Pie indicated would happen: 

If this idea were implemented, no longer would it be int he interest of a fam's main attacker to kill-off pop before a fleet-jump.  As pie mentioned, assigning pop to occupations suited to a main attacker empire would be essential to provide game balance, as, essentially, pop becomes an asset to a main attacker rather than an annoying NW booster..

Still, even though it wouldn't be in the interest of a fam's main attacker to kill-off pop before a fleet jump, there would still be purposes to killing-off pop, such as being able to do a scorched earth strategy as already mentioned.

Additionally, as horrifying as it is to even consider, if it happens that the kind of pop your empire is made up of affects empire bonuses and morale, a player might want to kill-off a race of pop in his empire:  example player's thought process: "Damn all those pesky income-draining, over populating partaxians with their spook 'magic' - hogwash~ ~!  They're polluting my chosen Qantam race! Messing with my empire's bonses! GRR!  How dare they make my Quantams the minority in their own Empire!!@!@?  Never!@!@"  /player wipes-out all the partaxians in his empire.

Other thing that could happen is the player might want to kill-off his empire's chosen race, and thus 'switch' from being a banking Quantum to an attacking Wardancer empire mid-round.

There are a lot of implications and reasons why a player might want to kill-off certain planets' or systems pop or specific races of pop in his or her empire.  Of course, this sort of activity should come with a penalty to that empire's morale.

Yes, something needs to be done.

Okay, so if pop becomes a resource useful to any type of empire, including a main attacker, the main attacker will still want to limit his or her planet number to reduce NW and to provide his or her bankers with more planets.

In such a case, a fam's main attacker will want to have one or a few ridiculously overbuilt pop planets so as to benefit from the bonuses of having pop and so as to be capable of maintaining mass amounts of military units (if pop is linked to how many units you can maintain). 

He'd have to have very little infra on other planets, or infra that doesn't require a lot of pop to maintain.  For example, say research centers might require only 5 pop each to facilitate, a fam's main attacker might have only 3 or 4 massively OB pop planets in deep core systems with the rest of his planets built with research centers.  This makes the main attacker vulnerable, if, say, an enemy fam's main attacker sends a massive fleet to break portal on a fam's main attacker's pop planet.  If the fam's main attacker has his pop concentrated on only 3 planets, such an attack would diminish that fam's main attacker's fleet capacity by 1/3. 

To recover from such an attack, the fam would have to quickly pass one of the fam's pop banker's planets to their main attacker (whereby the pop of the planet passed to the main attacker would be switched to doing occupations that maintain fleet).  If not, the main attacker's fleet would start disbanding rapidly because he no longer has the pop to maintain his fleet.

There would have to be crafted a whole slew of occupations suited to every sort of empire type, and the amount of pop to run different types of units and infra should take into account the type of empire that would use such units / infra.

This could get really complex...

Say the following was the ratio of units / infra to pop required to maintain infa and units:

Soldiers: 1:5
Droids: 1:0.5
Figs: 1:25
Bombers: 1:100
Transports or 'Trankies' (see other thread): 1:50
Destroyers (see other thread about capital ships): 1:100,000
Carriers: (see other thread about capital ships) 1:500,000
Wizards: 1:1000
Agents: 1:25

RC: 1:5
Farms: 1:10
MF: 1:50
OC: 1:50
RS: 1:50
TO: 1:250
CF: 1:200
LQ: 1:500

Say a fam's main attacker had his few pop planets taken / destroyed and say the above were the ratios of unit and infra to pop required to maintain fleet and infra, the ratios for maintaining capital ships would collapse first. What would this mean?  Would the capital ships really simply disband?  No.  For capital ships, there would be an exception: they wouldn't disband.  Instead, their respective attack power / carrying capacity would diminish according to the ratio of unit to pop that maintain carriers.  At worst, they'd simply have 0 attack power / carrying capacity if the ratio went to 1:0.  This would make them easy targets whereby they could be captured by a single transport / trankie with a single droid / soilder.  That said, the ratio would never fall as low as 1:0, and so there would always be some attack power / carrying capacity of capital ships.  For instance if the ratio for carriers fell to 1:250000, the carrying capacity and attack power for the empire's carriers would be 50%. Destroyers and everything else would be functioning properly, though.  Only the carries would be affected.  So, if a main attacker's pop planets got taken and pop were killed-off, the fam's carriers should be put under the command of one of the fam's pop bankers (if the pop banker had a large enough pop allocated to occupations that would support carriers (to be discussed), or the fam's secondary attacker with enough pop in such 'occupations' that would support those carriers, and keep the carriers under their control until the main attacker can have some pop planets passed to him and have that pop allocated to 'occupations' that would support carriers. If the ratio of units to pop that supports destroyers fell below the threshold of pop required to support destroyers, the attack power of the destroyers would be diminished accordingly, such that if the ratio became 1:50,000, the empire's destroyers would be operating with only 50% of their attack power.  In this case, there could be a way for fleet command to temporarily decommission 50% of the destroyers and hide them somewhere so they wouldn't get captured, or transfer half of the empire's destroyers from fleet command to a fam's secondary attacker, and thereby raise the attack power of the remaining destroyers under fleet command back to 100% attack power.

Only capital ships would be exempted from auto disbanding / dismantling, though.  So if an attacker empire has no capital ships, they would have no need for a huge pop.  But if the ratio of units / infra to pop fell below the threshold for regular units / infra, that empire could collapse in a kind of chain reaction.  The units / infra would start to disband / be auto dismantled as follows:

Wizards would be first to disband, leaving the empire open to further pop attacks.  Then LQs would get disbanded, then TOs, CFs, Bombers, MFs, OCs, RSs, ''Trankies', Figs, Agents, Farms, Soldiers, RCs, and then finally, Droids.  Each tick, though, pop is replenished if there is room, so each tick the empire can recover somewhat.  However, if it gets to the point where LQs are being auto-dismantled, this is a kind of point of no return: you'd see the units and infra of the empire disband / dismantle until it reaches an equilibrium.

A player could take measures to prevent such a collapse even when LQ's start dismantling: the player would have to switch the occupations of the empire's pop to prevent the disbanding / dismantling of the units / infra that the player deems necessary to keep.  For instance, the player would have to adjust the percentage of his empire's pop which are in occupations that support 'civilian infrastructure and units' to prevent the auto-dismantling of LQs, because only pop allocated to certain 'occupations' would maintain LQs, and other civilian infrastructure / units (more on this to be discussed).  Even switching pop to civilian occupations that maintain LQs but don't support other civilian infrastructure could occur.  For instance, to prevent a chain reaction of population decline, a player might adjust the occupations of the pop from 20% 'scientists' to 0% scientists and raise the percentage of his pop that are 'mercantilists' (which would be an occupation that supports LQs) to prevent the LQ's from auto-disbanding next tick and causing a chain-reaction of societal collapse.  Doing this would result in all his empire's RCs dismantling the next tick, but, again, this would prevent any more of his LQs dismantling the next tick, and avoid the chain reaction of societal collapse.

Basically, if a high percentage of the pop are in 'occupations' that maintain civilian infrastructure and units rather than 'occupations' that support military infrastructure and units, auto disbanding of wizards (civilian units) and auto-dismantling of LQs (civilian infra) is virtually impossible to occur due to merely a few wiz ops. But if the pop is allotted to primarily occupations that support military infrastructure and units, the empire is more easily vulnerable to wiz ops.  That coupled with attacks on pop planets could trigger a 'societal collapse' where wizards and LQs start disbanding / dismantling automatically each tick.

You would need to determine which 'occupations' maintain which units / infra very thoroughly.  There could be cross-overs, where certain occupations support both military and civilian infrastructure and units, including capital ships.

There's a lot more to this, if you're serious about going this direction, Pie...

For instance, if you go this route, nukes would have to kill stationed units and pop, not only infra.

I think pop still makes sense as a nw factor, but I could see reason to adjust the nw formula.

I think limiting fleet size is a good idea generally.  I don't really like *arbitrary* restrictions on how players play the game but this seems like a restriction that's rooted in a reasonable design decision.  I've been thinking for the last few weeks about a problem IC has with abundance.  I wasn't going to post much about it in the short term but it seems players are reaching or have already reached the same conclusion.

I'll edit this post with a discussion link soon.

I do and I don't want to do this.  It's tricky.

The challenge for me as a game designer, and you guys as a think tank, is balancing game improvements without changing the spirit of the core gameplay.  IC, despite its flaws, has lasted a very long time through long stretches of dev inactively because the core game is good enough to keep the die-hards and even still attract and keep new players once in awhile.

So to apply that to your scenarios above: if we're making it so complex that you have to understand an intricate system of tweaks, we're doing it wrong.

However, there are ways to do this in a sensible manner.  There is a design technique called progressive disclosure that presents only the high-level features of a system up front, but still allows the deeper complexities to be available for power users.  In the context of IC that means introducing features like this that amount to *optional* micro-strategizing, but keep it balanced enough that casual players can still succeed without having to spend their entire round worrying about tweaking knobs.

That itself requires a layer of design/implementation *on top of* this feature to ensure that it fits within this model, while still keeping the feature itself from completely changing the spirit of IC.  These are not easy things to figure out, but conversations like this one are a starting point.

These considerations are what differentiates good games from great games.  I *do* want to go in this direction eventually but if and only if we have properly accounted for the overall design balance.

As a result, the totality of something like what you suggest just isn't feasible in the short term.  What we can do however, is start breaking it down into chunks and figuring out what works and what doesn't.  This whole conversation is incredibly rewarding but at some point we have to ask how it can actually be implemented.

I'm going to take some time later to comb through this post and break apart the functional components so that we can start moving toward possible implementation.

But yes, I am *very* serious about this general direction.  Although I don't agree with all of the details you posted, your ideas here are in line with the general direction I want to move IC toward: embracing a more realistic take on strategy and challenging IC's norms without compromising its spirit.

On that note, I was thinking there would be a standard default set of occupations, and like the 'invisible hand' of the free market, pop is assigned to those default occupations automatically according to the infra and units owned.  This could be adjusted, however, as you mentioned, by 'power users' who want to micro-manage things for strategic purposes.  One thing that could be done in this regard to allow players to create their own custom occupations, whereby a player could assign points (just as you assign points when creating custom races) choosing to what extent units / infra are supported by that occupation.  This would allow players to specialize their empire, or suite their game-play strategy.