I would love to see some sort of mechanic where the population can exceed what the planet can support, which would lead to issues with unrest, excess resource usage, environmental damage etc.
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Is there going to be a mechanic for overpopulation?
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What I see problematic there is, there would be a point where even the whole galaxy couldn't support its own citizens (and slaves 
) anymore. How would you deal with that situation?
Otherwise, I like that idea, it makes the whole thing more realistic and give you a reason to expand. Maybe it could be dampened by policies such as "secretly holding the population number down by so called "natural disasters"" or "Let's pretend to be nice but secretly sterilize everyone!" (https://www.gateworld.net/wiki/Aschen) xD
) anymore. How would you deal with that situation?Otherwise, I like that idea, it makes the whole thing more realistic and give you a reason to expand. Maybe it could be dampened by policies such as "secretly holding the population number down by so called "natural disasters"" or "Let's pretend to be nice but secretly sterilize everyone!" (https://www.gateworld.net/wiki/Aschen) xD
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seems like another late game crisis, leading to mass extinction of species. which then allows for new life to grow and new empires to form!
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In order to handle overpopulation when you run out of new planets to colonize, there would have to be some mechanisms of population control. Some would be draconian, which would have an adverse impact on happiness, other 'more advanced' methods would not have such deleterious effects.
I do believe that adding such a mechanic would make the game more realistic and add some interesting choices for the player to make.
I do believe that adding such a mechanic would make the game more realistic and add some interesting choices for the player to make.
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In my opinion, if a planet is overpopulated, the POPs should lose fertility, and thus stopping the super-overpopulation.
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I would like for planets to go all coruscant-like as population increases.
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Species don't lose their ability to procreate just because the population is high. Species survive by breeding and the instinct to breed is not dampened just because the planet is getting overcrowded. Basically, people want to keep making new people, and if there isn't some kind of external pressure to keep the population down it will continue to grow. All you are saying is that you don't want any kind of overpopulation mechanic in the game, which is how most of these 4x games operate. It is certainly the easy way out, but it is most definitely gamey and not reflective of the real world.
I think Stellaris has the potential to be a special game and that having to deal with population control would add a realistic dynamic to the game that other games have not had.
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Maybe pops will be more migrate to other planets in your empire if the one world they live on is overcrowded. And if there's no good planets in your empire they'll consider migrating to another empire.
This is sensible, but i'm having trouble thinking of a method of reducing population growth that WOULD'NT be horrific. Either you start killing people, or you starve them all, or sterilise them the Aschen way as mentioned before - people aren't going to be happy about it, either way.
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Or you give the people with one or less children (or even no children in the extreme way) significant advantages, so that less people will want to have children because then they would lose those advantages. That's my peaceful solution for decreasing population growth.
But to actually decrease the amount of people that are already there, I see no way that wouldn't mean to kill them directly ("accidentally" bomb/explode a planet or even star) or indirectly (sending them into a hopeless war so many people die, cut off the food supply lines so everyone starves).
I, personally, would never want to do that to my own people, which means I would try to colonise even more parts of the galaxy (or universe?). That would mean that my species would then start developing new and better engine systems that could take my people to other galaxies in the relatively short time of a few centuries. Orbital habitats could be a transitional solution while my people research on the engines.
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You wouldn't have to kill your people; I could think of a number of things that could be done to slow population growth. Economic incentives could be used as stated previously, forced sterilization, possibly a drug that decreases people's desire to mate, a birth lottery etc. One thing to remember is that we are going to be dealing with alien species that will have different method's of producing young than we do. For an insectoid race all you might need to do is change the rate at which the queen pumps out eggs, for a molluskoid species just cull some of the eggs etc.
Development is a good form of birth control... rearing costs go up, need for cheap farm hands goes down.
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China's one child policy is a real example of state population control that isn't horrific, though criminals trying to get around it have done horrifying things. Licenses for having children have been explored in numerous novels, with the downsides usually similar to the OCP.
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I don't think so. We humans used to have many more children in the past, because that's what we needed back there, more farmers or workers, and it was economically and socially acceptable. Many developed countries today have their populations increasingly smaller due to increasing living costs and not that many jobs. When people don't want to have children, they don't. They are not uncivilized animals, they are a FTL-capable race. And even if they still want to have sex, they can use a condom (or space-equivalent). Another argument is to take China's population control. If the are enough problems, not necessarily caused by law, people can opt to not have as many children.
Of course, this only applies to human-like civilizations, which most species in Stellaris seems to be (yes, there can be a hive-mind, but they are intelligent enough to not overpopulate it) as they are all FTL-capable. It would be interesting if there was one that basically did what you say in your example, and that would be a really cool gameplay element, but in my opinion, it's not for all races.
Something that bothers me with your explanation, is that you say: "population = +population" is based on Malthusian theory, which is outdated and pretty much disregarded today (Neo-Malthusian =/= Malthusian). Why? Because it treats humans as if they were rabbits, which is wrong in many ways, like the examples I gave sometime ago.
Also, just explaining that when I mean a fertility penalty, it's for the reasons above and only local to the overpopulated planet, and only when it reaches a certain threshold. It's not that the species become less fertile.
By te way, I never said I don't want an overpopulation mechanic, I just don't like your way in doing it.
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Look at Africa, famine, lack of developement, education, basic needs and constant wars and still population booms.
Imperium Galactica featured a civilization-wide sacrifice, where entire race participated in a huge celebration where you could choose to sacrifice a percetnage of your total population. The more you sacrifice, the more morale bonus you'll get, as sacrificing less will make your people think you are weak.
Warhammer 40k solution is to either build Hive Worlds, with population numbering dozens of billions or constantly siphoning excess population to colonization fleets and neverending wars.
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Famines or actual food shortages? People more often die from not being able to afford food during a famine or drought than there being an absolute deficiency of calories. Modern relief efforts also go a long way to allowing population booms in areas with low agricultural stability due to poor infrastructure or low availability of yield increasing technology.
One look at a graph of the global over time will make you a believer in Malthus. Human civilization has never died from overpopulation, because overpopulation is never a catastrophe. In fact, it tends to fix itself. Thousands of people don't suddenly die from there not being enough food, tens of thousands die younger from malnutrition. We were constantly hitting this problem until the industrial revolution that allowed an exponential increase of agricultural productivity. Until then, the average growth rate was less than one tenth of one percent because each of agricultural involution. Pre-industrial population booms almost always are preceded by the introduction of new crops, new techniques, or new technology. Sometimes they were preceded by trade, though, which fits the more food more people hypothesis.
Malthus' problem is that he was a jerk that didn't give a crap about the poor, who are the root of problem, assuming you hate babies enough to call them a problem. Increasing per capita value to the point where a child is a financial liability instead of an asset, no matter how small, is the only way to get zero or near zero population growth and and long life expectancy.
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I'm not saying that the population would just keep growing infinitely, at some point, the pressures on the population would cause growth to stop. What I am saying is that the population growth would not stop at the optimal population level. Let's say the planet in question could comfortably support 16 'pops'. When there are 16 pops, everything is going good so people are going to keep having children at the normal rate. When the population reaches 17 pops, things start to go bad and the standard of living on the planet starts to drop. If there are places for the population to migrate to this isn't a problem, but when the galaxy has filled up and there are no more colonizable planets, if you don't have a way to control the population size then your empire will become overpopulated and suffer penalties due to unrest, habitat destruction etc. I don't know exactly when the population would stop growing, but let's say growth would start to slow down in the case of this particular planet once the population hits 17 pops. When it hits 18 it would slow down more and let's say the growth stops at 19. This leaves you with the problem of having 3 unemployed and unhappy pops on your planet which could cause all sorts of problems.
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Anschluss.What I see problematic there is, there would be a point where even the whole galaxy couldn't support its own citizens (and slaves
Failing that, entice our gods from *outside* to come down to *heavy space* and *party*.
Really, though, I feel like the best way to handle overpopulation would be mind uploading. Then, your only problem is inevitable terminal entropy.
Just as a note here: on earth, the number of children (people under 20 years of age) have not increased since 1991, which means right now we are just waiting for everyone born since then to grow up. When that generation is the oldest generation (around 2060 or so), the world population will stop growing at about 12 billion if the trend holds.
Check Hans Roslings talks for reference on this.
So, for humans at least, it seems that development and education solves the overpopulation problem automatically, provided we get it soon enough (ie before we have an overpopulation problem).
That said, you can argue that getting access to FTL and loads of new worlds might change this dynamic, and a mechanic in game for handling this might be interesting.
Check Hans Roslings talks for reference on this.
So, for humans at least, it seems that development and education solves the overpopulation problem automatically, provided we get it soon enough (ie before we have an overpopulation problem).
That said, you can argue that getting access to FTL and loads of new worlds might change this dynamic, and a mechanic in game for handling this might be interesting.
Or the batteries getting empty...
But seriously, you would need to get to that point in the first place. Your civilization may suffer from extreme overpopulation (and everything that follows it) for maybe two or three thousand years, before your scientists finally make it, no matter how much they try. It may even happen, that your whole civilization (and with it, maybe the whole galaxy?) never developes such a technology, simply because nobody ever saw the necessity for researching even the basics. What, if your race never built any big and even nearly as complex machines?