People assume that you are supposed to resettle your pops all the time (I used to think that, too), and they're miffed because the poorly designed interface does make sthis task outrageously tedious indeed. And they would be right, because it is tedious and there's no end to it. You have to click back and forth, scroll up and down, expand tiny little windows that keep collapsing when you'd rather have them to stay expanded, and you must keep doing this until you finally quit your campaign out of exasperation.
But here's an unorthodox thought:
We're not actually supposed to resettle so many pops. In fact, we shouldn't even be allowed to. The whole concept is absurd in its exploitability and gamey-ness, not to mention how ridiculously unrealistic it is. For the price of only half a dozen thousand energy credits, we are able to transform a newly-settled colony into a metropolis, or a fully developed homeworld into a ghost town; and it all happens instantly, without the slightest delay, social upheaval or political cost.
For the sake of realism and our sanity, a few changes are needed:
1. Not all pops should be equally eager to allow themselves to be resettled. People love their homes and jobs. They may feel too comfortable where they are, or maybe they feel patriotic attachment to their homeworld. In the real world, it is mostly the dissatisfied who become migrants.
Therefore, if you resettle an unemployed pop to a planet where good climate, a job and a home are waiting for them, they should receive a happiness modifier. Conversely, a pop that is being resettled from a gaia planet to a tomb world, should receive a happiness penalty.
2. When you do things to people that they don't like, they can be surprisingly stubborn. For starters, it should be outright impossible for democratic governments to resettle pops from good conditions into worse conditions. And for all other governments, the attempt should be costly. It should cost many times more to resettle a pop to a place that has less than 60% habitability, than to one that has more than 80%. Those breathing masks, vaccinations, environment suits, life support devices and climate control systems don't pay for themselves. Add to that the material incentives for the pops themselves, to make them more pliable.
3. Under certain conditons, a resettlement attempt should have the potential to outright fail. People can resist your attempt to send them into exile. They stay put, and incite their neighbours to do the same. Now you have to send in the army to dislodge them. Better hope your forces are stronger than their resolve. Good luck!
4. Pops shouldn't arrive instantly. The farther away their destination is, the longer they should be in transit.
5. The pops of the receiving planet should also have a word in this. If you settle a lot of xenos in their world, they would become xenophobic, and if they already were xenophobic to begin with, they would potentially turn to violence - either against the migrants or against you, the government.
6. Conversely, automatic migration away from planets with poor living conditions towards better ones should be much more pronounced. Spontaneous mass migrations should be a thing, even if it could potentially topple your own plan of which planets you'd rather see developped at the expense of others.
7. Governors should also take a more active role in maintaining their political interests. Leaders don't like it when you take their underlings away from them and give them to another leader. Resettlement between sectors should be inherently more expensive than intra-sector resettlement, and it should not only cost credits, but also influence (reflecting the political capital you have to expend to make the governor cooperative).
8. There should be a limit to how many pops you can resettle at a given time. You only have so many starships, and they can only carry so many people. The bigger your navy, the more people you can expatri... er... resettle.
But here's an unorthodox thought:
We're not actually supposed to resettle so many pops. In fact, we shouldn't even be allowed to. The whole concept is absurd in its exploitability and gamey-ness, not to mention how ridiculously unrealistic it is. For the price of only half a dozen thousand energy credits, we are able to transform a newly-settled colony into a metropolis, or a fully developed homeworld into a ghost town; and it all happens instantly, without the slightest delay, social upheaval or political cost.
For the sake of realism and our sanity, a few changes are needed:
1. Not all pops should be equally eager to allow themselves to be resettled. People love their homes and jobs. They may feel too comfortable where they are, or maybe they feel patriotic attachment to their homeworld. In the real world, it is mostly the dissatisfied who become migrants.
Therefore, if you resettle an unemployed pop to a planet where good climate, a job and a home are waiting for them, they should receive a happiness modifier. Conversely, a pop that is being resettled from a gaia planet to a tomb world, should receive a happiness penalty.
2. When you do things to people that they don't like, they can be surprisingly stubborn. For starters, it should be outright impossible for democratic governments to resettle pops from good conditions into worse conditions. And for all other governments, the attempt should be costly. It should cost many times more to resettle a pop to a place that has less than 60% habitability, than to one that has more than 80%. Those breathing masks, vaccinations, environment suits, life support devices and climate control systems don't pay for themselves. Add to that the material incentives for the pops themselves, to make them more pliable.
3. Under certain conditons, a resettlement attempt should have the potential to outright fail. People can resist your attempt to send them into exile. They stay put, and incite their neighbours to do the same. Now you have to send in the army to dislodge them. Better hope your forces are stronger than their resolve. Good luck!
4. Pops shouldn't arrive instantly. The farther away their destination is, the longer they should be in transit.
5. The pops of the receiving planet should also have a word in this. If you settle a lot of xenos in their world, they would become xenophobic, and if they already were xenophobic to begin with, they would potentially turn to violence - either against the migrants or against you, the government.
6. Conversely, automatic migration away from planets with poor living conditions towards better ones should be much more pronounced. Spontaneous mass migrations should be a thing, even if it could potentially topple your own plan of which planets you'd rather see developped at the expense of others.
7. Governors should also take a more active role in maintaining their political interests. Leaders don't like it when you take their underlings away from them and give them to another leader. Resettlement between sectors should be inherently more expensive than intra-sector resettlement, and it should not only cost credits, but also influence (reflecting the political capital you have to expend to make the governor cooperative).
8. There should be a limit to how many pops you can resettle at a given time. You only have so many starships, and they can only carry so many people. The bigger your navy, the more people you can expatri... er... resettle.
