Pop growth and how 10 people reproduce as much as 200

[TheGrouch91]

So yeah as the title says. Does anybody else find it strange that once you reach the 10 pop threshold every planet spits out pops at the same base speed?

Not only does it make no sense at all but it also twists the gameplay in a dramatic way. Now spamming colonies no matter the planet condition is actually the way to go. Habitability doesn't matter that much when you only have 10 pops on a shit planet and then use it as a breeding ground and move new pops away as soon as they appear.

Playing tall is an absolute pain the ass because you grow so incredibly slow. In general I feel that the most limiting factor in terms of expansion is not resources but it is pop growth. So you are even more incentified to spam sex camps all over the universe where people only live to breed.

So I'm interested in you guys opinion. Do you feel the same? And what would be your ideas to fix that problem. My personal solution would be to just lower the base reproduction speed and then add a flat amount for each pop. Maybe with some diminishing returns so a giant city planet doesn't spit out a pop each month. But lets say the base growth was 1 and every other pop adds another 0.1? At the 10 threshold you would still grow very slowly and rely on immigration. But at 20 pops you already grow faster than the current baseline.

 

[Wolfgang I]

I think the old malus to pop reproduction on planets with low habitabillity worked well enough. That they could ignore that mechanic was one of the reasons why machines and robots were good before 2.0. It was also the reason why Nivlacs were so OP.

 

[Eled the Worm Tamer]

The way pops breed does mean that past early game if you are xenophile theres no point in desighning your species. I mean my founder race is 6% of the honeworld... I like that its a melting pot, but still those carefully curated traits I agonised over aren't exactly doing a lot for me nowadays.

 

[ComradeKroo]

Pop growth dire need a new fix, or a new mechanic.
Current meta is changed, from tall tech to wide pop growth.

 

[AlanC9]

It's not like Stellaris really ever had a good pop growth mechanic.

 

[Duuk]

I posted this in another thread, too. The current pop growth dynamic is... odd to say the least. It also disproportionately screws up minority representation meaning that it evens out empires for no logical reason. If your empire is 100% Furbolg and 1 pop of Weasel shows up the game engine will dictate that only weasels will grow until weasels make up a large portion of your population.

It definitely needs to be reworked.

 

[Eled the Worm Tamer]

I mean dont get me wrong in my above. I am genuinely pleased that my civ is living up to the boast of the Modern Colosus, I love imageninghow vibrant how dynamic the culture must be when you have litteraly hundreads of species living along side each other united in common cause. But what ever they were trying to simulate with this mechanic, they failed. It repreesnts no real world situation of migration, not even the right wing fortress nation fever dreams.

 

[Slynx]

I usually do exactly this. colonize everything, buy all slaves and conquer to resettle (also raiding bombardment).
and my main species...well..i choose traits only fitting for my leaders

 

[tobias.mb]

Why would you settle low habitability planets though? Just find some neighbour with the correct climate type, sign a migration treaty, then use those pops to settle the planet. The migration treaty alone will give you a lot of growth on top of it.
And if those neighbours don't like you, just liberate them. Then you even get perfect candidates to form a federation with.

 

[Tacticus101]

I dont disagree from a balance perspective (playing tall needs a little buff), but pop in Stellaris is an abstraction, it isnt supposed to be a linear comparison.

 

[Challenge]

Growth percentage should be based on the current population, not on a base number. I could see it in the pre 2.2 format since the pop limits were pretty small, but with the new update it isn't keeping pace.

 

[Dinkelman]

I think pop growth isn't really flawed fundamentally. Reworks are hard and they take time. Better to make it affected to some extent by habitability. I also agree tall play needs a buff though, in unity too especially. There are no penalties to more pops and planets to tradition costs anymore which makes little sense. For research that change made sense, but unity should be harder with a larger empire, thematically and from a balance perspective.

 

[Sopbucket]

The reason why pop growth is so emphasized right now is because your population is the primary bottleneck for expanding your economy.

What if, say, district and building contruction took longer and used way more minerals, but extra amenities, housing and jobs raised the base growth rate on a planet? So first you build up a planet, and then the population grows to meet the planet's needs. If you had to be selective about where to build, it would effectively prioritize the growth of some planets at the expense of others. That could help make tall play competitive, for sure.

 

[Danny Pockets]

Try colonizing any planet regardless of habitability and see if it doesn't tank your economy.

 

[Badesumofu]

Try colonizing any planet regardless of habitability and see if it doesn't tank your economy.

It doesn't because you just resettle them off as they grow. Having 10 or fewer (the 10 pops can be mostly robots anyway) pops on a low habitability planet doesn't really have much of an effect.

 

[faljen_isus]

pops that have superior pop growth should outgrow base growth or slow breeders, not in 100-200 years but by the late late game, maybe

10 pop-species shouldnt become equal in number to 100 pop species if their growth and reproduction control levels are the same, never

 

[Foefaller]

The reason why pop growth is so emphasized right now is because your population is the primary bottleneck for expanding your economy.

What if, say, district and building contruction took longer and used way more minerals, but extra amenities, housing and jobs raised the base growth rate on a planet? So first you build up a planet, and then the population grows to meet the planet's needs. If you had to be selective about where to build, it would effectively prioritize the growth of some planets at the expense of others. That could help make tall play competitive, for sure.

Those things do affect the Immigration pull of a planet, but not the actual pop growth.

I do agree there needs to be tweaks to a lot of the pop stuff, this is just one of them. Hopefully it gets some more tweaks as they go along.

pops that have superior pop growth should outgrow base growth or slow breeders, not in 100-200 years but by the late late game, maybe

10 pop-species shouldnt become equal in number to 100 pop species if their growth and reproduction control levels are the same, never

Actually, on top of the growth speed, rapid breeders are favored over regular pops for deciding what the new pop will be, and slow breeders less. Over time rapid breeder pops should make up the majority of your empire.

 

[Shadowstrike]

Since population growth is based on the number of planets, there's no incentive to do anything but to go wide: each planet is another chunk of population growth. What would be more balanced would be for population growth to be based primarily on the number of existing pops, with everything else as a modifier. Right now, if you have 80 pops on one planet, they would have 1/8th the base growth of 10 pops on 8 different planets. It should really be that these two situations should lead to similar growth (or even favoring the 1 planet case, since more planets also means more potential resource exploitation). To put some numbers on a system like this:

Base growth = Population * 0.01/year (this is based on real-world growth; the starting 25 pops should grow 0.25 pops/year, so 4 years for the 1st pop growth, vs the default 33 months, but the growth rate will accelerate as there are more pops on the planet)

(Multiplicative) Modifiers:
* Habitability
* Availability of Food, Housing & Amenities
* Stability
* Traits
* Citizenship/Strata (as a percentage)
* Planetary Growth Modifiers (i.e. gene clinic, clone vats, etc.)
* Policies/Edicts

And then have immigration added on top of it as a flat number (which should all sum to zero)

Growth should be considered for each species on each planet individually. To address the issue where you can have a lot of "fractional" pops because you have a lot of different species, a new pop should be generated each time the sum of all the "growing" fractional pops on a planet adds up to 1. The "new" pop would belong to whichever species had the largest "fraction", and their counter is set to a negative fraction. Here's an example:

Initial state
Humans = 8 pops (+0.6 towards a new pop), with +0.1 growth/month
Blorgs = 2 pops (+0.3 towards a new pop), with +0.1 growth/month

After 1 month tick, the sum of the "fractional" pops goes from 0.9 to 1.1, so a new pop is created. Because humans have the largest "fractional" pop, the new pop is human, but we subtract 1 from the fraction (i.e. 0.7 - 1 = -0.3).

Humans = 9 pops (-0.3 towards a new pop)
Blorgs = 2 pops (+0.4 towards a new pop).

In essence, there are still 8.7 humans and 2.4 blorgs (and those numbers will go back into the growth rate calculations above), but because the system needs integer numbers of pops, there's a human pop that represents the (mostly) human excess.

The advantage of this system is that population ratios should remain largely stable, with changes to that ratio occurring due to differences in immigration, base growth rate, habitability and social/economic conditions.

 

[LeonOfOddecca]

Since population growth is based on the number of planets, there's no incentive to do anything but to go wide: each planet is another chunk of population growth. What would be more balanced would be for population growth to be based primarily on the number of existing pops, with everything else as a modifier. Right now, if you have 80 pops on one planet, they would have 1/8th the base growth of 10 pops on 8 different planets. It should really be that these two situations should lead to similar growth (or even favoring the 1 planet case, since more planets also means more potential resource exploitation). To put some numbers on a system like this:

Base growth = Population * 0.01/year (this is based on real-world growth; the starting 25 pops should grow 0.25 pops/year, so 4 years for the 1st pop growth, vs the default 33 months, but the growth rate will accelerate as there are more pops on the planet)

(Multiplicative) Modifiers:
* Habitability
* Availability of Food, Housing & Amenities
* Stability
* Traits
* Citizenship/Strata (as a percentage)
* Planetary Growth Modifiers (i.e. gene clinic, clone vats, etc.)
* Policies/Edicts

And then have immigration added on top of it as a flat number (which should all sum to zero)

Growth should be considered for each species on each planet individually. To address the issue where you can have a lot of "fractional" pops because you have a lot of different species, a new pop should be generated each time the sum of all the "growing" fractional pops on a planet adds up to 1. The "new" pop would belong to whichever species had the largest "fraction", and their counter is set to a negative fraction. Here's an example:

Initial state
Humans = 8 pops (+0.6 towards a new pop), with +0.1 growth/month
Blorgs = 2 pops (+0.3 towards a new pop), with +0.1 growth/month

After 1 month tick, the sum of the "fractional" pops goes from 0.9 to 1.1, so a new pop is created. Because humans have the largest "fractional" pop, the new pop is human, but we subtract 1 from the fraction (i.e. 0.7 - 1 = -0.3).

Humans = 9 pops (-0.3 towards a new pop)
Blorgs = 2 pops (+0.4 towards a new pop).

In essence, there are still 8.7 humans and 2.4 blorgs (and those numbers will go back into the growth rate calculations above), but because the system needs integer numbers of pops, there's a human pop that represents the (mostly) human excess.

The advantage of this system is that population ratios should remain largely stable, with changes to that ratio occurring due to differences in immigration, base growth rate, habitability and social/economic conditions.

I like your idea for multi-species growth. Much better than the current system.

However, I'm not sold on making the growth of a planet depend on its current population. That would lead to massive population growth on already populated planets, which doesn't really work with the way the game is structured. For instance, the cap on number of buildings would mean you'd eventually get a lot more pops than you have jobs for. Perhaps this system could work if you introduce another modifier that significantly suppresses population growth as it approaches some pre-determined limit based on number of districts.

 

[Danny Pockets]

It doesn't because you just resettle them off as they grow. Having 10 or fewer (the 10 pops can be mostly robots anyway) pops on a low habitability planet doesn't really have much of an effect.

That's a pretty expensive option. Also where are you resettling them to? All the other low habitability planets you spam-colonized?

I'm not saying this play-style is impossible, maybe you can make it work. But it's not as though there aren't substantial costs associated with this. It's not just some kind of over-looked exploit, which seems to be the suggestion in this thread.