The Habitability Pop Growth Problem (beta)

[Senstrae]

I see a lot of threads discussing pop growth mechanics, but most seem to cover the same beat of '1 pop growing at a time that prefers minority populations results in homogenization and that's bad'. Briefly, I agree, but I'll leave that subject to the many other threads.

What I haven't seen much discussion on is the fact that species keep growing on or migrating to low habitability worlds.

In the beta build I had a life-seeded, xenophile, materialist, egalitarian start. I met xenos, gave gifts, opened migration treaties, and used xeno pops to settle new worlds. I didn't pay too much attention to the pops themselves until I realized that I had an amenities problem, which was unusual because I wasn't neglecting amenities buildings.

That's when I identified that every non-gaian world in my empire had a significant low-habitability population, in many cases as low as 10% or 20% habitability. I really shouldn't need to manually move desert preference pops off tundra worlds, especially since I had multiple gaia worlds and at least one arid world with available housing.

Then I took Engineered Evolution and Glandular Acclimation to free up my founding species, and I created a template for each planet type. Since my species distribution had a gap in continental preference, I converted a single pop of my founding species to that, and made a few colony ships. A few months later, to my chagrin, I noticed that the continental preferring founder pop was growing on my tundra world.

Has anyone else noticed this behavior?

 

[SirL]

I don't bother with those xeno-species at all. Set my primary species to forced-grow, sign a bunch of migration treaties and still got more from migration than from forced grow minus. I feel like this is kinda retarded, who is migrating then? How xenos migrating to my territory help grow my own population, but they will never grow at all. Migration system needs to be reworked, it should be separate from pop grow system, solves a bunch of problems

 

[Cymsdale]

Habitability is supposed to be a factor in which pop grows where, but it doesn't appear to be strong enough to counteract the "we must make minorities equal" pull.

 

[Person012345]

There should be a very significant malus to selection for non-suitable pops imo. That being said,I do still think you should get the occasional 20%er showing up here and there. If you want perfectly optimal population distribution it really should require active controls by you. If you're playing an empire that lets people go where they want, they might go places you don't want them. I don't think it should be super likely, a tundra preference pop might move to a desert planet but that would be like me moving to texas, there'd have to be a pretty damn compelling reason for it, I get uncomfortable when the temperature gets into the mid-20's. Then again, some people have damn compelling reasons to do it.

 

[Senstrae]

There should be a very significant malus to selection for non-suitable pops imo. That being said,I do still think you should get the occasional 20%er showing up here and there. If you want perfectly optimal population distribution it really should require active controls by you. If you're playing an empire that lets people go where they want, they might go places you don't want them. I don't think it should be super likely, a tundra preference pop might move to a desert planet but that would be like me moving to texas, there'd have to be a pretty damn compelling reason for it, I get uncomfortable when the temperature gets into the mid-20's. Then again, some people have damn compelling reasons to do it.

The key word here is "should". If there is a malus, it's either not working, or it's not significant enough.

This also isn't a "here and there" thing, because I had to relocate 20 ill-suited pops (lower than 40%) off a 40 pop world and this wasn't the only world like that.

I'm not asking for perfect distribution. Heck, I'm playing xenophile egalitarian with migration treaties for a reason. I want an alien melting pot society. But I don't want to bleed out extra food and consumer goods, because some species haven't figured out what worlds they should prefer to settle on. Especially if they have readily-available superior alternatives.

 

[ShoGuL]

Yep, I had this issue as well. I ended up terraforming all worls to continental and continually gene-modding all pops in my empire to continental preference. It's the only way to keep the population from going insane.

 

[Shadowstrike]

To look at this problem differently, it's another facet of the "only one species can grow at a time" issue. It's not that pops moving to inhospitable planets that is an issue: it's that they grow numerous there because only one pop grows at a time and the algorithm tries to equalize out the pops. If pop growth was per species and based on current population of a species modified by habitability, this wouldnt be an issur.

 

[Bayes]

Just dont play egalitarian, problem "solved". Put on migration controls and resettle the species you dont want on that planet. You still get the actual migration growth, you just get to grow the pops you actually want, without the 20% maulus.

 

[Person012345]

The key word here is "should". If there is a malus, it's either not working, or it's not significant enough.

This also isn't a "here and there" thing, because I had to relocate 20 ill-suited pops (lower than 40%) off a 40 pop world and this wasn't the only world like that.

I'm not asking for perfect distribution. Heck, I'm playing xenophile egalitarian with migration treaties for a reason. I want an alien melting pot society. But I don't want to bleed out extra food and consumer goods, because some species haven't figured out what worlds they should prefer to settle on. Especially if they have readily-available superior alternatives.

The key word is actually "imo" even though it's not technically a word. I think everyone agrees pop growth is horribly borked atm.

 

[Arutar]

I don't bother with those xeno-species at all. Set my primary species to forced-grow, sign a bunch of migration treaties and still got more from migration than from forced grow minus. I feel like this is kinda retarded, who is migrating then? How xenos migrating to my territory help grow my own population, but they will never grow at all. Migration system needs to be reworked, it should be separate from pop grow system, solves a bunch of problems

Good point. Forced growth having an effect on immigration (i.e. forced growth also prevents all migration from other species while still getting an immigration growth bonus) is really just another problem of the mess that is species growth at the moment. Maybe immigration and species growth (from births) should be tracked separately?

Just for clarity it should be pointed out that forced growth requires population controls policy, and thus unfortunately is not really an option al least for egalitarian empires.