Soft limit of population

As you probably know every country has a soft limit of population growth which primarily depends on your membership status and health care index.

My suggestion is to add an extra number on top of the existing soft limit. This is how it should work: total soft limit = Basic limit + bonus limit

Bonus limit would change when:

• You buy population using Gold Coins. This would encourage people to buy population much more and populations would not disappear like now but would still depend on health situation.
• Winning war and not taking over the country would give winner 50% of bonus limit the defeated country had. This would encourage wars and at the same time would reduce number of take over/drops of the defeated countries.
• Taking over the country would mean you only being given the default limit, so you would lose the bonus the country had.
• The Bonus population limit would be visible for everyone on countries population page
• The total soft limit would never exceed hard population limit

The countries would have these limits as the default:

• Free members Þ 15M + 10M
• Premium member Þ 90M + 35M

I really believe this could be the change that would encourage people to fight more and do not take&drop conquered countries.

I also hope this is not hard to implement and I am willing to pay W3C 2000 GCs for doing this.

Any opinion on this one?

I do like the idea of benefits for choosing not to take over a country. I know a lot of people are afraid to wage war because they don't want to lose their countries. I think I would also like to see a system where the conquered country has to pay financial reparations to the winner, and that conquest can only occur with a vote from the security council before the war starts. That could be included with the population bonus also. The current soft limit is higher than the numbers you suggested though. Is that intentional?

The numbers were used just to give a better understanding of the suggestion.

Basically as cash can be removed from the country at any time the only real benefit of war is population. But without changes in soft limit it would decrease anyway so buying or transferring it makes no sense in a long run. My proposal would change that. Also it would create a system where taking over the defeated country, would be strongly discouraged.

I have won many pvp, and there are too sides of that always. One is that you are glad that you won, but another sad side is that you see these good guys leaving. Usually when you plan war you don't want to make someone leave the game, you just want to win the war and get something out of it in return. When you have 10 developed countries you don't need to wage wars to get another one.

If we could invent wars without losing the countries - that would be a major improvement to the game for a very long time.

I really want to see W3C reaction on this, as I believe this new direction of encouraging wars without taking over countries could be very successful.

I 100% agree with you on not wanting players to leave the game after defeating them in a war. I think the major problem is that every war in this game is essentially total war. There is no option to have more limited wars, where the purpose of the war is to inflict some economic damage or to enforce some policy issue. Annexation should be rare and difficult, and should only occur with some international consensus. There should be severe penalties for annexation, such as sustained rebellions empire wide to represent an insurgency campaign. I'm not sure if providing a population cap boost to countries will be enough to deter the practice of conquest and deregistering. I think it could be a part of a broader solution to allow for more limited war that does not have to end in conquest.

Yes, you are right - the broader solution is needed. On one hand you need to promote wars and on another one you need to make people don't want to annex. This population boost thing is one of many possible options so if w3c would like to move this direction we could add many more things to make it broader.

I think w3c would like to see people spending gold coins much more than today so this is one of the options where this would happen naturally.

So I have been thinking of a solution for this that could be worked in with the mechanics of the game. This is what I think would be good.

In order to annex a country you must have a security council vote prior to declaring war. Without a vote, war can only end in non conquest. Any war that ends in non conquest will require the defeated country to pay reparations. Reparations would be the sum of war damage on both sides, paid over a period of time by taking 50% of monthly profits until the debt is paid.

Wars that end in annexation will trigger an insurgency that lasts 20 game years. The insurgency affects entire empire. It will result in terror attack disasters that can destroy corporations, forts, damage population centres, and reduce welfare index. There should be a percentage chance every month of this occurring, and the only way to reduce the chance is to have a high military index. This would force countries to deploy troops in peacetime to stop insurgency, so there would be a large cost associated with conquest.

What do you think?

John, most of all you propose is new limitations which are easy to implement but they do not encourage to fight at all. We need to think about balanced proposal which encourages the wars but discourages annexations. Fighting should be fun and easy to do, we just need to think what players would benefit from that.

Maybe you can add the part of what you would like to get by not annexing the country?

You would get the reparations for not annexing and insurgency for annexing. I think if the reparations were substantial enough and the insurgency bad enough it would encourage players to not annex.

Andy, can you share your opinion on this idea?

I think that is a great idea Lord Mndz. I really like the idea of bonus limit on population. Will add a new dynamic to the game. One of the complaints I have heard throughout the forum over the past few months from new players and free members is the static and lack of population growth. I believe that would fix that problem.
Wow 2000 GC's that is quite an incentive. Hmmm wonder what I could do for you to give me 2000 GC's -lol.

Thanks Michael.

Andy what do you think about it?

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Jonni can you give your opinion on this

Bump for Andy/Jonni

This is an interesting idea and we will look into it.

It is a very different way of looking into population that now depends mainly on current population + natural growth.
Natural growth depends on the population level and health.

The is also a cap for free players.

This idea requires a complete new approach.

We will consider it seriously.

Thanks Andy, just let me know if I can help somehow.

The reason that the population limits are soft limits rather than hard limits is that there are no population numbers in the computation process.

The soft limitation is achieved by making the birth rates (in the age groups 18 to 35) depend on the size of the population in the 0 to 4 year olds.

The larger the numbers of babies and kids up to 4 years old, the lower the birth rates go. And then also the health dependent death rates are taken into account.

This makes the suggestions of increasing the population "soft" limit, by fixed numbers of population a little harder to achieve.
We can of course, under a set of conditions, as suggested, and more, allow higher birth rates.
we can introduce some birth rate "delta" that will be added to the "old" birth rate which will result in higher numbers of births in countries that earned this "delta".

This is a thought but we are also looking at the possibility to have this "delta" (or population bonus), as a number of people that will be added to the population while birth rates keep going as they did before.

This is no announcement of change but rather a step in the process that will end, we hope, in a new feature of "population bonuses".

Thanks Andy, this made me very happy!

don't hold your breath.

I want it ASAP but there are some open questions and the kind of events that will trigger an increase in population.

I understand, good luck with the implementation!