The Case for Removing Pops

[gunner6]

The Pop system in Stellaris is, honestly, a mixed bag. It makes planet management much more interesting than province manangement in EU4 or CK2, which is a plus, but on the other hand, the micromanagement involved does not scale well to the late game. This is part of why Sectors exist, but we don't need to be told that the AI is not very good at playing the tile management game, and so Sectors continue to be a headache.

Switching from the more abstracted Pops to a more concrete Population counter confers a few advantages. It's much more fine-grained than Pops are, which means that all of the discrete Pop processes are closer to continuous. This means effects that add/remove/move Pops -- pop growth, migration, resettlement, and the interstellar railroad -- will be gentler, continuous processes, which means less freaking out when your planet is suddenly starving because you didn't notice one of the farmers moved away. (You could also reach equilibria where migrating population is balanced by new population, so you're basically exporting population from certain planets. But i digress). This also allows bombardment to have more teeth without being too overpowered, and provides a ready-made framework for disease, forced sterilization, and more.

Finally, having a full population count allows for a Manpower mechanic for Army and Navy size, not unlike that in HOI4 or EU4.

The population dynamics itself is straightforward. Population would grow at a rate dependent on the current population (of that species), the total population, the planet size, and the species habitability (some simple approximation of logistic growth). Larger planets would be able to support a larger population without penalty, and the habitability of a planet reduces the maximum population it can support. Modifiers like death from disease, purging, or bombardment; or growth from migration or resettlement would be applied on top of the base growth rate.

More complicated is how to replace the tile and building system. My thoughts are this: each planet has a Development score in 4 areas: Infrastructure, Industy, Finance, and Agriculture. Industry, Finance, and Agriculture are straightforward, and represent the 3 basic resources in the game. Infrastructure represents the basic infrastructure required to support the population -- planets with insufficient infrastructure will incur a happiness and growth penalty. On the other hand, surplus infrastructure will give a small happiness bonus to the population, and will increase migration attraction. Species with better living conditions require more Infrastructure. Infrasturcture is also important for buildings, but more on that later.

Each Development category can be increased in rank and value. Increasing the value is akin to building more basic mines, farms¸ etc. Increasing the value of Infrastructure increases the population that can be supported without penalty. Increasing the rank is akin to upgrading those basic buildings. The total development value is limited by the planet size (to throw out a number, 5 times the planet size, but it could be more).

Basic mines, farms, and power planets are removed from the game, and relegated to the Development scores. All other buildings are divided into two categories. Common Buildings are Labs, Strategic Resource buildings (like Betherian Plants and Xeno Zoos), and anything else that wasn't planet unique -- they can be built multiple times per planet. Unique Buildings are everything else, and are planet unique. Buildings count against the development limit of a planet (1 per building), and are limited in number by the Infrastructure value. Buildings might have other requirements, as well -- certain development ranks and values in certain areas (e.g., the Mineral Processing Plant requires Infrastructure II and an Industry development of at least 20), or a minimum population (e.g., for the Capitol).

Tile blockers would act like buildings, except they would occupy up a larger number of Development slots.

The removal of Pops and tiles presents the question of how to enure different populations (e.g., different species, or slaves vs. non-slaves) work the appropriate tiles. I considered a complicated queuing and population assignment system, but I realized that this would be way too much micro. Instead, each species is distributed across Infrastructure, Industry, Finance, and Agriculture according to the relative development values of each category. Population assigned to infrastructure is further subdivided among the common buildings. The exceptions to this equitable division of labor are:

1. Livestock are all assigned to Agriculture (even if it would be disproportionate).
2. Slaves, Proles, and Robots/Droids are preferentially assigned to Industry and Agricultre (in that order) (if there are more slaves/etc. than can be assigned to these categories, then they are assigned to Finance, then Infrastructure, and suffer the relevant penalties)

Trait bonuses to production are averaged over the population assigned to each development category. If your Industry is worked in equal numbers by Industrious and Weak species, then you get an overall 7.5% boost to mineral production.

Below I've made a mock-up of what this could look like in-game:

The top row shows the current Development and Infrastructure Surplus/Deficit. The middle row now shows the total population instead of the number of Pops.

The top panel shows a species summary of the planet, and an ethics summary of each species. The bottom panel shows the Development of the planet, broken up into each category, and the buildings that have been constructed. The yellow triangle on the Industrial development score is the upgrade button, and the orange bar below the Infrastructure development indicates I'm building more infrastructure. I was envisioning a CK2-like interface for buildings, but I kind of failed and gave up with the mock-up for that part.

 

[Admiral]

The Pop system in Stellaris is, honestly, a mixed bag. It makes planet management much more interesting than province manangement in EU4 or CK2, which is a plus, but on the other hand, the micromanagement involved does not scale well to the late game. This is part of why Sectors exist, but we don't need to be told that the AI is not very good at playing the tile management game, and so Sectors continue to be a headache.

Switching from the more abstracted Pops to a more concrete Population counter confers a few advantages. It's much more fine-grained than Pops are, which means that all of the discrete Pop processes are closer to continuous. This means effects that add/remove/move Pops -- pop growth, migration, resettlement, and the interstellar railroad -- will be gentler, continuous processes, which means less freaking out when your planet is suddenly starving because you didn't notice one of the farmers moved away. (You could also reach equilibria where migrating population is balanced by new population, so you're basically exporting population from certain planets. But i digress). This also allows bombardment to have more teeth without being too overpowered, and provides a ready-made framework for disease, forced sterilization, and more.

Finally, having a full population count allows for a Manpower mechanic for Army and Navy size, not unlike that in HOI4 or EU4.

The population dynamics itself is straightforward. Population would grow at a rate dependent on the current population (of that species), the total population, the planet size, and the species habitability (some simple approximation of logistic growth). Larger planets would be able to support a larger population without penalty, and the habitability of a planet reduces the maximum population it can support. Modifiers like death from disease, purging, or bombardment; or growth from migration or resettlement would be applied on top of the base growth rate.

More complicated is how to replace the tile and building system. My thoughts are this: each planet has a Development score in 4 areas: Infrastructure, Industy, Finance, and Agriculture. Industry, Finance, and Agriculture are straightforward, and represent the 3 basic resources in the game. Infrastructure represents the basic infrastructure required to support the population -- planets with insufficient infrastructure will incur a happiness and growth penalty. On the other hand, surplus infrastructure will give a small happiness bonus to the population, and will increase migration attraction. Species with better living conditions require more Infrastructure. Infrasturcture is also important for buildings, but more on that later.

Each Development category can be increased in rank and value. Increasing the value is akin to building more basic mines, farms¸ etc. Increasing the value of Infrastructure increases the population that can be supported without penalty. Increasing the rank is akin to upgrading those basic buildings. The total development value is limited by the planet size (to throw out a number, 5 times the planet size, but it could be more).

Basic mines, farms, and power planets are removed from the game, and relegated to the Development scores. All other buildings are divided into two categories. Common Buildings are Labs, Strategic Resource buildings (like Betherian Plants and Xeno Zoos), and anything else that wasn't planet unique -- they can be built multiple times per planet. Unique Buildings are everything else, and are planet unique. Buildings count against the development limit of a planet (1 per building), and are limited in number by the Infrastructure value. Buildings might have other requirements, as well -- certain development ranks and values in certain areas (e.g., the Mineral Processing Plant requires Infrastructure II and an Industry development of at least 20), or a minimum population (e.g., for the Capitol).

Tile blockers would act like buildings, except they would occupy up a larger number of Development slots.

The removal of Pops and tiles presents the question of how to enure different populations (e.g., different species, or slaves vs. non-slaves) work the appropriate tiles. I considered a complicated queuing and population assignment system, but I realized that this would be way too much micro. Instead, each species is distributed across Infrastructure, Industry, Finance, and Agriculture according to the relative development values of each category. Population assigned to infrastructure is further subdivided among the common buildings. The exceptions to this equitable division of labor are:

1. Livestock are all assigned to Agriculture (even if it would be disproportionate).
2. Slaves, Proles, and Robots/Droids are preferentially assigned to Industry and Agricultre (in that order) (if there are more slaves/etc. than can be assigned to these categories, then they are assigned to Finance, then Infrastructure, and suffer the relevant penalties)

Trait bonuses to production are averaged over the population assigned to each development category. If your Industry is worked in equal numbers by Industrious and Weak species, then you get an overall 7.5% boost to mineral production.

Below I've made a mock-up of what this could look like in-game:
View attachment 251051
The top row shows the current Development and Infrastructure Surplus/Deficit. The middle row now shows the total population instead of the number of Pops.
View attachment 251053
The top panel shows a species summary of the planet, and an ethics summary of each species. The bottom panel shows the Development of the planet, broken up into each category, and the buildings that have been constructed. The yellow triangle on the Industrial development score is the upgrade button, and the orange bar below the Infrastructure development indicates I'm building more infrastructure. I was envisioning a CK2-like interface for buildings, but I kind of failed and gave up with the mock-up for that part.

I will need some time to think your system through, but I do agree that the tile management mechanic needs replacing.

The fact that you can't manage tiles in sectors essentially makes tile management a stage-specific mechanic. Once you've expanded beyond your first five systems and created your first sector, tile management is gone, the only exception being upgrading your core planet buildings every time you get new ones unlocked. That being said, do you have any ideas on how to make Stellaris as much about internal development and diplomacy as well as warfare?

I've always seen that Stellaris is strongest in the early game, those wonderful first few hours where anomalies are everywhere and it's just you and an open galaxy. There's a pioneering spirit to it as you uncover mysteries and make first contact, bringing that beautiful question of how to interact with them: do you befriend them, leave them alone and hope they do the same to you, or conquer them? Eventually, though, everyone will expand to fill the galaxy, borders will become solid, and you have nothing to do but war.

Stellaris is, when you really get down to it, a war game. Your empire is little more than a gigantic war machine that converts Energy and Minerals into battlefleets and armies. There is no victory wherein one has reached cultural sophistication or some great technological pinnacle, nor some high level of internal stability or productivity. Literally the only victory conditions are based around war (be the last one standing, control a certain percent of the galaxy, or have your federation control a certain percentage of the galaxy), and the late-game Crises offer nothing but a penultimate foe to do nothing but war against.

Even worse is how the way the game is structured to force this: other than the very bland sector "management" (set taxes to 75%, replace governor every so often if you're bored) there is absolutely no good internal management mechanics. Don't even get me started on the Faction system. In CK2, Factions could be addressed in a multitude of ways: send your spymaster to discourage them from joining factions, bride them to make them happy, give them council positions, assassinate them, try to pre-emptively imprison them, use strategic marriages, or use your chancellor to improve your relations with them. Managing Factions meant managing factions. In Stellaris you just click a button to spend some Influence, or just wait for them to gain enough power and then *sigh* fight a war against them.

With weak internal management mechanics you are forced to look outward, and there's little else to do but war with others. You can trade for resources but what do you do with them? You either build ships and armies or build mines so you can get more resources to build more ships and armies. You can do research agreements but to what end? Getting tier after tier of each weapon?

 

[Endless Rain]

I like the idea of removing the current abstract Pop system and replacing it with a fine-grained one like in Victoria 2, but I don't see that much of a need to overhaul the building system. Just have each building's output be scaled to the number of people working on it, with diminishing returns providing a reason to build more than one of a type of building. (With one billion people being the equivalent of one Pop under the current system.)

Changing Pops this way would make population no longer limited by planet size, which would make Tall Empires much more viable. Stellaris's current pop system currently caps the amount of pops, and thus productivity and fleet capacity, for small empires, and uncapping population sizes on planets this way would be a perfect way to fix that.

 

[Slynx]

please no. management of Pops is a fun and interesting part of the game.
if you remove them planets will become dull and uninterestiing.

 

[Me_]

Wtf is it about these forums and their pie chart fascination. Paradox should release a pie-chart simulation as their nex IP.

 

[ramius3443]

Wtf is it about these forums and their pie chart fascination. Paradox should release a pie-chart simulation as their nex IP.

I for one would welcome Victoria 3's release

 

[Alblaka]

A very, very interesting suggestion.

I mean, rather obviously, shuffling pops around to minmax the last few % of bonus is a pain, even before the inevitably inflation of planet and pop counts. And with the recent change to slaves and the supposedly upgraded sector AI, it appears Paradox realized this as well and wants the player not to be bothered with micro'ing pops.

Buildings and tiles however, are a different stick, which is mostly about playing a little puzzle with the two adjacency bonus' we have to maximize ressource output according to whatever you deem required. In theory, this is an engaging and nice mechanic.
In practice however, it all comes down to placing the capital, placing a storage, building the Mineral Processing Plant, the Energy Hub, and then filling the rest of the tiles with production buildings depending on how much you care for the tile-based single bonus ressources and your empire's needs. There is no real puzzle work there, once you figured out the rather flat depth of the current system. Worse even, I'm 100% confident to say that, despite the system possibly offering depth, but not having much of it implemented, the AI is yet unable to exploit even that, making the whole building-tile-adjacency thing a player-micro annoyance of semi-bland nature which only slows down the AI further.
Of course, I would definitely prefer them extending tile adjacency effects and provide a solid stock of varying building to properly permit specialization of planets, but if they don't intend to do that, they might as well just scrap tile-based buildings in first place.

Which, truly, removes the only real argument contra this suggestion, past the obvious 'it takes effort to implement'.

And, without question, the advantages of the system you explained are obvious and manyfold.

However, the issue lays in the fact that I doubt Wiz will ever be persuaded to change a mechanic this massively, without heavy pressure from the community. And I don't think this idea will please everyone the same, probably because plopping down buildings into tiles, as repetitive and simplistic as it may be, is still a very fun mechanic to some, who therefore wouldn't want to lose it in favour of a more streamlined calculation and numerical overview.

 

[Arizal]

If Stellaris had been created with that system, I would absolutely love it, but I think part of the appeal Stellaris has had on new Paradox players was it's apparent simplicity and visually pleasing format. If we were to remove Pops as they are now to replace them by this kind of more "spreadsheet" model, I fear we could lose some players who like to micromanage their planets for not that much added in terms of game depht.

 

[General Retreat]

Part of the reason discrete pop numbers aren't a great idea is because of the extreme variance you can expect between the infinite possibilities of procedurally generated species.

With clearly defined numbers, players lose the ability to imagine the nature of their species, instead replacing it with the assumption that everything reproduces in broadly human terms. At the end of the day, pops don't represent a specific amount of population, it represents the amount of population it takes to effect a basic output of production.

Based on that you could have a billion humans, 5 billion diminutive eusocial hobbits, 1,000 yuht style titans, all abstracted as a single pop.

A compromise that I actually greatly favour is retaining pops but swapping to a percentage system which affects output. A growing pop at 10% outputs 10% of its worked tile resource. An overgrown pop at 150% picks up the corresponding bonus to production, with maybe a malus to happiness or unrest to represent squalor.

This allows for many of the advantages outlined above, in that population becomes more granular, but without fundamentally changing the character of the game. It would also allow additional interesting tall/wide strategies.

EDIT: For a working prototype of the OP in action, check out the X4 game Horizon. The game wasted it's potential horribly, particularly in combat, but the tech and population systems were fairly interesting if you gave them some time to get going. The game is turn based and mainly relied on pregenerated and scripted races, although there was a moderately robust empire creation system. The changes are pronounced enough that the systems wouldn't translate into Stellaris particularly well though.

 

[TheDeadlyShoe]

because you rework tile blockers as simply taking slots rather than tiles, they become rather..pedestrian? and you never get interesting decisions like going for a blocker tech in the tree because its covering some particularly valuable tiles on your planets.

you lose the visual feedback of seeing your pops on your planet, an oomph to larger worlds, visual distinctiveness between a frontier world and a capital planet, etc.

you also lose the atomic nature of pops, i.e.: if you have a bunch of pacifist pops on a planet because (w/e) it's intuitive and obvious that transferring them to another planet they stay pacifist (at least for now). instead you have adjusted numbers on a spreadsheet which eh.

The Last Federation uses a system like this and its kinda confusing and uninteresting imo.

 

[Sheriff Godwin Law]

2 months ago I might have agreed with this.

But this system doesn't account for the transfer of alien pops and I'm just too excited about being able to transfer enslaved alien domestics to serve as happiness boosts on my worlds.

 

[Slynx]

ecause you rework tile blockers as simply taking slots rather than tiles

right...and btw there are adjustment bonuses (silos, capital, some tombworld blockers or primitives

 

[gunner6]

OR, you can grow up, acknowledge that important details have been left out of this original post and avoid throwing around childish names for those of us who with hold support for the proposal until clarification is made.

I did think i covered it fairly well, if not explicitly.

Resettlement would allow you to pay monthly influence in order to siphon population from one planet to another. You would be able to select by species which species to move, and they would retain the same population proportions as on their source planet. The cost and migration time would be set so that at the end of the day, you've spent the same amount of influence to move the equivalent of 1 Pop in the same amount of time.

But of course I like sliders so you'd be able to increase the total population moved or decrease the migration time for more influence, or the opposite for less influence.

Migration would work much the same, but without the player's control. Migration speed would be controlled via policy and buildings (it would be dependent on the attraction) and would naturally decay as destination planets lose their infrastructure surplus and source planets increase their surplus (by losing population)

 

[Slynx]

Because everyone who isn't a plantbrain can easily figure as much.

judging by my avatar i can at least pretend that i'm a plantbrain. rawr!
and, no. it's not obvious. if you don't say it - it doesn't exist. we're not telepaths here.
also people have different points of view. some say pops are just numbers. some count them as living people and care about their needs and happiness...some count them as tools and enjoy minmaxing.
also...seeing 25-tile planet full of pops that is about to be purged is not the same as witnessing a dull statistics.

 

[LeibSSolmai]

For me this suggestion somehow sounds like "Lets take the tile managment, the decisions where to build a specific building, the put the species with the best traits in a specific tile puzzling and the decision where to build your capital building while colonizing and replace it with an excel table".
Personally I rather look on the pictures of my pops instead of a pie cart, of course the looks of your species don´t change anything, but the suggested system makes everyone to simple numbers. And you can´t deny that it is much more fun to purge Space Geckos instead of a line in an excel table.

Also I saw only a single reason for changing to the new system, and that was "sectors can handle it better". If that is the only reason why most of the planet Management should be removed, then I rather want this development time used to improve sectors instead.

 

[Alblaka]

OR, you can grow up, acknowledge that important details have been left out of this original post and avoid throwing around childish names for those of us who with hold support for the proposal until clarification is made.

and, no. it's not obvious. if you don't say it - it doesn't exist.

Basically, noone of us is here to write detailled essays on how to generate simulations of population sizes in Stellaris.
And assuming we did just that, for some reason or another, the effort would be completely wasted, since it would never even make it into Stellaris.

What we do, is make suggestions to the developers as to what we/me/any_single_person_making_a_suggestion would like to have in the game. And if that suggestion is more then just 'make more ships plz', but wants a significant change to a specific concept, the proposed concept is elaborated in detail.
HOWEVER, for the purpose of changing singular pops to wholesome population counts, there is no reason whatsoever to explain to the devs every single math formula they should use to calculate growth rate, loss of population over time by bombing, affect of starvation, loss of population by unrest and revolts, natural decay rate, loss of lives by UV radiation, purging, migration and so on and on and on and on...
By writing an essay on hundreds of possible variables, you only prove that you do not comprehend what you're supposed to do, which is, to provide a suggestion, a concept or a inspiration. Not a complex mathmatical framework which the devs wouldn't even plain-put into the code IF it was perfectly accurate and modelled all their design intentions correctly.

That's why, as I said, OP does not need to list every single possible interaction with associated values, because saying 'There's pops in form of numbers, and these numbers can change to represent migration, or forced migration, or starvation, or purging' is entirely enough to elaborate the concept.

And that's exactly why I went ahead and made a snideful remark about a specific user's intelligence, because he was effectively demanding OP to make the concept LESS useful, just because he didn't grasp that going too far into detail with suggestions doesn't achieve anything but having your suggestion appear to bothersome to be read by a dev.


But eh, at the end of the day, this thread isn't even in the Suggestions forum, and won't be ever read again 2-3 days from now on, albeit it's not like we have any assurance that the devs are browsing the Suggestion forum in first place.

 

[Slynx]

Basically, noone of us is here to write detailled essays on how to generate simulations of population sizes in Stellaris.
And assuming we did just that, for some reason or another, the effort would be completely wasted, since it would never even make it into Stellaris.

i see it in a bit different way(maybe i'm wrong. we, plantminds ,sometimes have troubles to understand fungiminds logic.
the OP came and made a suggestion. yes, i agree that he shouldn't write a big essay, but at least he can mention every aspect of his idea. you don't even need to use detailed formulas to do it.
and then people who came here to read the suggestion can react, and probably point some aspects that are good\bad\missing. or at least try to explain why they don't like it

 

[Alblaka]

yes, i agree that he shouldn't write a big essay, but at least he can mention every aspect of his idea

But didn't he?
He completely explained the changes and their purpose. He just skipped the part where he would effectively say 'And we need to change how mechanic X interacts with component Y, because Y changes with the new system'. I.e. if I propose to half all gains and expenses of food to reduce numerical inflation, I would say 'and alongside all food modifiers have to be adjusted accordingly' and not 'And you need to change how much food is gained from the governeur food trait. And you need to change how much food is gained from the Dust Strategic ressource. And you...'

To me, explicitely listing every connected (and possible only minimally relevant in form of some specific edge case) mechanic in a concept/suggestion seems like stating the obvious.

i see it in a bit different way

Then again, everyone's entitled to his own, valid oppinion.

 

[Sheriff Godwin Law]

Resettlement would allow you to pay monthly influence in order to siphon population from one planet to another. You would be able to select by species which species to move, and they would retain the same population proportions as on their source planet. The cost and migration time would be set so that at the end of the day, you've spent the same amount of influence to move the equivalent of 1 Pop in the same amount of time.

Huh, okay. First off thank you, unlike Alblaka's childish outburst and then 4 paragraphs of off topic rambling that try to conflate his 'civilian' status with an ability to shirk responsibility for his own words. You actually provided information and allowed us to better understand your thoughts and make an informed decision. You also did so in a reasonable amount of space, which is not something Alblaka has managed to do in ANY of his suggestions for game improvements that were far less complicated.

In your system how would you displace a population and replace on a full world? Currently you sorta play musical chair, transferring one population off to an empty spot, then transferring the population you want to locate into the vacated tile, it's not ideal. Could your system provide enough elasticity to only require a population to be transferred in, and then have the overpopulation encourage the migration of free populations out?

Charisma Bonuses create a minor but hard set effect. 1% happiness for 1 population. Happiness is never measured and has no effect in smaller percentages. So, we establish a hard set of population that would be roughly 1 population and then, what round up or down? Let the min-maxers worry about whether they have the right number of charismatic populations?

Ethics, I see you have sorted by species and planet and production I see you have turned into a percentage. Is there a way to carry over the current caste system dynamic where it's more arduous to maintain the larger you slave caste is?

Now, normally I don't bother with issues like this, since we are all fans here and not developers and if what we ask for is not feasible from a technological standpoint, the developers are welcome to ignore us. But Alblaka reminds me that to avoid responsibility for our suggestions is to remain children or at least child like. So, giving you the opportunity to continue being an adult.

Aren't you worried about this creating a drag on performance? Under our current system something like migration and population growth occur occasionally, and deal with a single unit so the calculation and change is done quickly between months. Likewise purging happens simultaneously to all purged populations so deals with at most 25 units and again all at once. Quick calculations that can happen seamlessly. Your system would have population changes occurring every month, on every world, from possibly a multitude of different sources and would have those population changes occur in much larger denominations. We're talking about easily more than 10 times the amount of processing dedicated to population movement. Is this idea good enough to justify that?

To me, explicitely listing every connected (and possible only minimally relevant in form of some specific edge case) mechanic in a concept/suggestion seems like stating the obvious.

That's fine kid, I get what you're saying, it's just not an accurate portrayal of this situation so isn't relevant to this thread. When you present an idea and are explicitly asked about a specific connection or set of circumstances, you should embrace the opportunity to provide an answer and continue the dialogue. If your idea is a good one than continuing the dialogue will only make that more apparent. If your idea has problems, than continuing the dialogue will reveal those problems and either give you a chance to fine tune the idea or abandon it.

Consider his response versus yours. He provided a clear and concise explanation of how he envisions this would work. I now see the advantages of it, particularly in my "possibly only minimally relevant edge case" and I even tossed him a softball that would let him call attention to one of the strengths of his idea before trying to position the conversation into a discussion of other cases to see how his system would respond in them.

You, on the other hand, belligerently insulted me for having the question, and rather than discussing the idea in the thread, have spent your last 3 posts arguing about whether you should have to account for every possibility in the original post, a claim that nobody made. To say that your contributions have been merit less would actually be too kind. In your defense of this idea you are actively hindering it by inspiring the creation of multiple posts that have nothing to do with the topic and would need to be sorted through by anyone trying to participate in this discussion.

 

[sdeezie]

Switching from the more abstracted Pops to a more concrete Population counter confers a few advantages. It's much more fine-grained than Pops are, which means that all of the discrete Pop processes are closer to continuous. This means effects that add/remove/move Pops -- pop growth, migration, resettlement, and the interstellar railroad -- will be gentler, continuous processes, which means less freaking out when your planet is suddenly starving because you didn't notice one of the farmers moved away. (You could also reach equilibria where migrating population is balanced by new population, so you're basically exporting population from certain planets. But i digress). This also allows bombardment to have more teeth without being too overpowered, and provides a ready-made framework for disease, forced sterilization, and more.

Finally, having a full population count allows for a Manpower mechanic for Army and Navy size, not unlike that in HOI4 or EU4.

If you eat corn on the cob, do you eat it straight across, typewriter-style, or around in a spiral?

This is ... for science.