Planetary Colonization Effort

[Darrell01]

Ok, I was reading some posts here, playing SMACX and thinking about building a city out of nothing. Now the elements to this are lots of colony pods, supply crawlers, terraformers and any defensive units/police. Ok here is the idea. You have this plain of height 1 land that is rolling. How many of these colony pods, terraformers, and supply crawlers will it take to just plop down a size 20 city? All this assumes no recycling tanks yet. just add one more pod once you build one. Also, 2 posts down is a list of definitions if I'm not being clear, which I don't think I am.

Colony Pods - 20 of course! Unless you have the planetary transport system, then you only need 17.

Terraformers - Well, this is tuff. If you are dotting the land immediately with boreholes, condensers, and soil enrichers, it'll take a bunch. Lets assume you have the Weather Paradigm and Superformers. This will make the calculation a little smaller.
Well, you'll need 21 rover formers to fully place the roads or 9 minimally. I like to put a road in the center so the colony pod can get there, then before I build it, I destroy it with a defending unit.
4 more to magtube each side assuming you build a straight up chess board style. Max, 16.
8 per borehole which makes 32 more.
Assuming you have 20 or 40 sky hydroponics farms depending if you have the cloudbase academy or not, you'll need 18 more food, so that's 3 soil enriched condensers, so you'll need 4 per condenser, 2 per farm, and 3 per soil enricher. That comes to a total of 9 per tile at 3 tiles, so 27 for the food.
Might as well build a forest and a sensor for defense, so that's 4 more terraformers. This will use up that last tile around the base tile.
So, assuming the max, you'll need 100 terraformers. 21+16+32+27+4=100

Supply Crawlers - With the above setup lets list them.
4 for the boreholes
3 for the condesers
1 More for the forest
8 Supply Crawlers Total

Wow. That is amazing.

Ok, now that will not work nicely with a ICS+1. That means you'll get 3 x 3 area for each base. Just subtract 12 rovers for the outer roads, 16 more because you have to put the boreholes in kinda like a weave on the adjacent tile of the base, and 8 for the magtubes. so you only need 64 formers.

Ok, I've been fooling around with ICS in my head. To pack those cities in nice and tight, you'll only be getting 3 harvestable squares per base. That means you get one borehole and 2 condensers. That's 14 food, so that's a size 14 city with max sky hydroponics farms. Only size 7 without.

So you'll need 4 for roads + 6 for magtubes + 8 for the borehole + 18 the 2 condenser farms. That's a total of 36 formers for max ICS.

Did I just make an expansionist argument for ICS and I haven't even done it?

So that's 14 colony pods, 36 formers, and 3 supply crawlers for max ICS.

Fooling around with some more numbers in my head, a chessboard style, or ICS+3 city with sky hydroponics farms and 4 boreholes leaves a city maxing out at ...
6 x 20 + 3 = 123. That's a population density of ...
123 / 25 = 4.92 population per tile. With ICS+1, you have population maxing out at...
6 x 3 + 3 + 3 = 30 with a forest, so that's 26 / 9, which is 2.888 population per tile. With max ICS, you have population maxing out at...
6 x 2 + 3 = 15 and 15 / 4 is 3.75 population per tile.

This is crazyness. Ok whatcha'll think about this? I forgot what the max for satallites are. If its less that let this thread know. And if my numbers are wrong, that'd be great if you pointed it out.

[Flubber]

Huh-- why build a forest and a sensor for defense?? Are you talking about the abse tile here since the best place for a sensor is on the base tile.

Otherwise I am not sure what the point is of this thread--

[Darrell01]

I've put the sensor on the base tile before and it didn't work. Apparently it does now because Flubber is throwin me some flak here.

Well, since there is the geosyncronous orbital observation satallite now, I guess you wouldn't even need a sensor. So with a satallite, ICS+1 would have ...
6 x 4 + 3 = 27 max pop for a city making it ...
27 / 9 = 3 population per tile.

And the point of this thread is just to fool around with the idea of what does it take to take some empty space on the map and immediately terraform it up and plop down 20 colony pods and there's a size 20 city. You know, for fun. I started thinking about the population density because at the end of the game, your score has your population in it. I was trying to determine what kind of score you might get if you filled the map completely with ICS, or evenly spaced chessboard style cities with that space of a 4 square there made by the corner of the cities.

Ok some definitions I'm using. I'll put in a little tile grid for each too.
B = Borehole
F = Condenser and Soil Enricher making 6 food
C = City; 3 food with the recycling tanks and +1 for each population due to sky hydroponics farms.

I might as well put in the maximum base population and population density per tile here for each strategy here too. This is how I get my calculations.
MBP = [6 * (number of Fs on the grid)] + (3 for the food in the base square)
PD/T= MBP / (Number of Tiles on the grid)

ICS : Bases packed extremely tightly together leaving only a 2 x 2 area harvested by a base. Infinite City Strategy, Insane Civic Sleaze, Illimitable Conurbanation Sprawl, Increasing Civil Swarm, Inner City Spread, etc...
Maximum Base Population = 15
Population Density per Tile = 3.75
BF
FC

ICS+1 : Bases packed very tightly together with only outer edge overlap, giving a 3 x 3 area for harvesting by the base.
Maximum Base Population = 39
Population Density per Tile = 4.333
FFF
BCB
FFF

ICS+2 : Bases packed tightly together with a 4 x 4 area harvestable by a base. (Obviously the bases will have to be slightly offset every "row" or "column" to ensure that one corner square can be harvested, unless its by a crawler)
Maximum Base Population = 69
Population Density per Tile = 4.3125
FFFF
BFBF
FCFF
BFBF

ICS+3 : Bases packed together, leaving a full 5 x 5 area harvestable by a base, other wise know as chessboard style. The four corners are included and harvested by crawlers.
Maximum Base Population = 123
Population Density per Tile = 4.92
FFFFF
FBFBF
FFCFF
FBFBF
FFFFF

ICS+4 : Bases packed loosely together, leaving a border area around each city not harvestable by a base, needing to be harvested by crawlers. It is essentially a 6 x 6 tile for the base.
Maximum Base Population = 189*
*189 I know is over the maximum population limit
Population Density per Tile = 5.25
FFFFFF
FFFFFF
FBFBFF
FFCFFF
FBFBFF
FFFFFF

The basis for my population calculation is assuming each ICS and ICS+1 has 2 boreholes, and ever other ICS+# has 4. Of note here, I did some thinking and 4 boreholes doesn't work in ICS+1. I was rushed off the computer when writing the original post and didn't get a chance to finish it out. So I suppose my ICS+1 population density will have to be changed. I'll just edit the top post.

Well the original idea for the post is what does it take to take some flat area and plop down a population 20 city in one turn, having everything the city needs to maintain its population supported by crawlers and the boreholes harvested by crawlers, leaving the entire populace as specialists. Then my thinking became, what if you were able to colonize the map to the most extreme point possible using the above strategies, what would your score be in relation to just the population? This has to do with how much population the planet will support per tile.

What was the max city size? 128? I forgot, as I have not reached it yet. 128 would be half of 256 and it makes sense, programming wise.

I suppose you could start the game playing ICS+2 and once you got all your formers and stuff together, you could put in more bases and play ICS.

Perhaps this entire post is spam.

[Chaos Theory]

Your population density is just a way of discovering that, very late, base tiles and boreholes are poorer uses of land than condensor-farms, thanks to satellites. You also won't reach base sizes above about 40 because you should have won by that long after hab domes become available.