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One of the purposes of the logistic growth on planets was actually to increase pop growth through a portion of the game to partially compensate for the increased growth requirements. I'd highly recommend adjusting LOGISTIC_POP_GROWTH_CEILING if people are changing REQUIRED_POP_GROWTH_SCALE - in fact, one of the things I'm hoping to gather from this open beta is whether or not we should lower the ceiling since we halved the scale.
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It seems to me right now from playing 3.0.3 that the S curve is missing the mark, because the slow growth right as colonies start up hurts them for too long (not great in early colonization), and with the lower building slots now, more established planets just tend not to have the jobs to end up near their capacity (so midgame things go crazy as the core planets become breeders that also pile on robots).
When I was playing Rogue Servitors in 3.0.1, I found that things were relatively reasonable on their robotic population with its flat growth rate, but the bio-trophies were an issue because I kept having to move in 3-5 to a new colony ASAP.
Thinking on the gameplay behind this, the problem is that colonies start out with ridiculously high carrying capacity (meaning they need to get a lot more pops than seems reasonable moved in to hit good growth) and going anywhere near full district development actually hurts growth.
Carrying capacity seems to be targeting the wrong thing (housing instead of jobs).
To think about extremes of gameplay, imagine a planet with very little spare housing, no unused district slots, but jabs galore, vs. a planet with tons of district slots, but nothing built and crippling unemployment; the current system says the former planet should have low growth as it's near capacity, while the latter planet should have high growth as it's around half its carrying capacity. Seeing as
both extremes are wrong, it's reasonable to conclude that the middle is wrong too, and that's what I'm seeing in games, as my "core" planets are pumping out pops where there's no opportunities, while my colonies twiddle their thumbs despite having abundant opportunity (and a decent few extra pops moved in to promote growth).
To think about "realism", logistic growth theories are premised on carrying capacity being bound by available
food, as population inherently wants to be exponential, but having too little food individually increases chances of having trouble reproducing and outright dying, putting a clamp on things. Shelter certainly has an impact on survival, but it can be presumed that overcrowding involves uncomfortable living conditions long before people are living in the sewers, and even then, people don't need much.
What guarantees access to food and other important things to live, like medical care, is generally having some kind of income to spend, and thus having a job. Now, obviously, many spacefaring civilizations have probably got crazy welfare going on, but even still, extra resources from income and social connections generally help deal with unexpected or nonideal situations.
I of course doubt that
just pure jobs would work well, as I find there's often few spare, but maybe jobs mixed with housing or other things in some form would be reasonable (it's quite possible averaging current carrying capacity with jobs would do it). It just needs to in some way be the case that there's a preference for having a planet move toward full district and building slot usage as long as there will be pops to come work, as opposed to now where you want to ship off pops at a certain point well before full slot usage.
