Prisoner balancing idea

Archived from groups: alt.games.vgaplanets4 (More info?)

The original problem with labor camps was that if you managed to get a
significant amount of prisoners early on, you because nearly
unstoppable. Yet at the same time, there should be a decent benefit
for capturing only a small amount of prisoners (like 100,000).

The bad blood scheme is a good first attempt to fix it, but I think
it's safe to say that most players are unhappy with it.

With that in mind, I've been brainstorming other solutions to the
problem:

1) This my favorite idea... have the camps produce something other than
money.

1) Make labor camp income less scalable somehow.

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Option #1 is based on the fact that money is such an unbalancing factor
in this game. Money can buy anything. Ships, weapons, equipment,
fighters, technology; you can even convert money into minerals and fuel
(factories + alchemy). Once you generate a ton of money, there's
nothing you can't do (well... if you have no crew to pilot your ships
then that's a problem, but that's rarely a limiting factor for somebody
with lots of prisoners).

But if you change labor camps to produce something less versalite then
they become less unbalancing, since the rest of your economy has to
catch up before you can reap the full benefits. If labor camps
produced weapons and equipment, but not money, then you would still
reap large benefits from having them - but you wouldn't be totally
unstoppable, since you still have to generate enough tax revenue to
purchase hulls to put the things on.

Weapons, ordnance, repair units, [more] supply units, base structures,
mechs, fighters... all of these things could be produced by labor camps
without being totally unbalanced.

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Option #2

The idea behind option #2 is to make capturing a huge number of
prisoners only slightly more beneficial (at least in the short run)
than capturing a small number of prisoners. There are several ways
this could be accomplished:

1) Tie the maximum labor camp income to the race's current population.
This is kind arbitrary... but it gets the job done.

2) Increase the initial investment required to build labor camps. This
forces players to ramp up their labor camps more slowly. And, it
provides juicier targets for outside forces to attack. I would say
that each labor camp should cost between 4 and 10 times its average
production, so that they take between 4 and 10 turns to pay for
themselves before you start to make a profit.

3) TrickyMath (tm). Make income proportional to sqrt( labor camps) or
something like that. Simple and effective, with the added bonus of
encouraging players to spread out more (which makes them more
vulnerable to counter-attack).

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Anyway, those were just a few ideas I've been meditating on. Any
thoughts?