Every tall game for me becomes a dystopia of crime infested planets during the midgame..
I tried building everything in the planet and still population keeps rising faster than i could build new jobs. Is population control the only solution?
been a week and i still don't seem to get the new planet-pop system
AFAIK, there are three good (i.e. advantageous to play) ways to utilize/manage pop growth.
The first way is to play with the egalitarian ethic. This is probably your best bet for tall play (which I'm taking to mean you want to keep planets & systems to a functional minimum). You'll get no happiness penalty, and unemployed pops will generate small amounts of unity & science. The caveat here, is that this is still fundamentally (at least in part) a 4x game. So, if you just *stop* growing you empire, you're going to run into problems. You're meant to keep expanding, one way or another, throughout the whole game. Which leads to the second way.
Which is to build an Ecumenopolis. It will take a long time to fill, gives you *much* more per district, helping you grow stronger while keeping that district count lower, and it will help soak up some of the growth from crowded planets by creating immigration pull.
The third way is to play authoritarian. This is my favorite, and it works even better with an Ecumenopolis than egalitarian, because you can transfer pops around directly without making anyone mad. There is no such thing as overpopulation in an authoritarian empire, only pops that need to be moved around. (Unless of course you stop colonizing or building new planets, but again, while that might be appealing from an RP perspective, the game seems fundamentally designed around continued expansion.)
However, there is a fourth way to avoid this problem, that allows for stagnant population growth. Given how robots work right now, it seems like a poorer choice than the above three, but the fourth option to avoid overpopulation, is to undergo synthetic ascension. Once everyone in your empire is synthetic, pops no longer grow on their own. Population numbers are completely under your control.
Synthetic ascension naturally works best with materialist or fanatic materialist, for the decreased upkeep, and also seems like the optimal way to play with academic privilege. Stratified society and Utopian abundance both seem like stronger choices, but it definitely depends on how you want to run your empire. Given that materialism is meant to facilitate out-researching everyone else, which is in turn facilitated by keeping Admin score low, I think this is probably the best way to play truly tall, where you can attain a vastly superior research ratio to your empire size, and then lock it in with synthetic ascension, thus preventing the pressure to keep expanding. This also seems like a potentially powerful way to play a MegaCorp, since they must needs avoid going over their Admin cap.
Living standards are now pretty significant, and to me, Authoritarian, Egalitarian, and Materialist feel like the fundamental ethics in the game right now. Obviously Auth. & Egal. are mutually exclusive, but I also would not mix materialist with either one. Robots lose a big part of their advantage if you give them rights, and stratified society actually provides cheaper consumer goods cost to workers than robots set to servitude.
Militarist, Pacifist, Spiritualist, Xenophobe, and Xenophile all seem like secondary ethics to me, in that I don't see myself bothering to play any empire (aside from Fanatic Purifiers) that is comprised *only* of these ethics, not having at least one point in either authoritarian, egalitarian, or materialist. The gated living standards are just so powerful, and as you've pointed out with your post, an empire really needs a strategy for managing population growth and avoiding overpopulation penalties in the late game.
