What is the in universe reason for pop growth slowing down as more pops are in the empire?

[Eladrin]

You could have applied a logistics growth curve to the empire as a whole, on top of the one you already apply on the planet level.

Each planet is growing slower as it fills up. But also the empire as a whole grows slower, as it fills up.

That's close to what we the systems do. Each additional colony increases growth since it's adding more production, but as the empire grows that additional growth is offset, generating another (mutated) S-curve. (We don't apply the penalties at the low parts of the curve since it felt pretty terrible in testing.)

There's also the assembly systems working alongside the logistic growth model.

"Boomer" is the game's true final boss.

It's clearly "Bubbles". Only a monster would name it "Boomer".

 

[fourteenfour]

None.

Why are we trying to come up with an in game justification when it clearly could not apply to all empire types? This is a common fault for many suggestions players put up, they forget that not all empires abide by the same rules or suffer from the same issues.

You may as well lay claim that is a maximum number of souls God permits and if you want a larger share you need to take them from somewhere else.

 

[The Founder]

None.

It does not need one. It is a game rule.

This is a common fault for many suggestions players put up, they forget that not all empires abide by the same rules or suffer from the same issues.

The different growth of gestalts is covered by them using Pop Manufacture rules as the primary source of population growth.

 

[ToneyT]

Space constraints as the population grows force families to have fewer children or no children at all. As the empire grows, increasing work complexity means more man-hours spent at any given job, leading to people being a bit more busy with work and having less time to raise a family. Better healthcare also means people spend more time doing their own thing instead of committing to raising a family.

^

This is more or less the answer.
Earth population is also predicted to plateau, and later start declining, after around the 10 billion mark.

That said, the decision ultimately comes from a gameplay perspective. The pop system we're leaving behind was DOA due to the performance problems it brought to the late game.

 

[The Founder]

That's close to what we the systems do. Each additional colony increases growth since it's adding more production, but as the empire grows that additional growth is offset, generating another (mutated) S-curve. (We don't apply the penalties at the low parts of the curve since it felt pretty terrible in testing.)

There's also the assembly systems working alongside the logistic growth model.

The problem is that it does not realy take capacity into account - only the numbe of pops in the empire.
And the right species might not even be selected as the one growing right now, defeating the purpose before the effect even applies.

I think I need to write a suggestion on this.

 

[DanielPrates]

It is clear that this is for ingame reasons but lets not forget the very real effect of BEHAVIORAL SINK:

Behavioral sink - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[Jorgen_CAB]

I don't really get this appeal to reality that many bring forth in defense of this mechanic, because it insinuates that an advanced interstellar empire would work like an overdeveloped first world nation (which quite often are pretty overcrowded) on earth, which is ridiculous. Every time a new planet is settled, living space and job opportunities for billions of people opens up which should lead to a boom in population (both from immigration as well as higher reproduction), which would be perfectly represented by the very good new planetary pop growth mechanic but gets destroyed by this weird, tucked on empire growth penalty, telling the population on this new planet to reproduce slower because there is already thousand pops in their empire.

It is a bad mechanic that makes tall, isolationist or pacifist playstyles less viable by introducing a point in the campaign where internal development will make you fall behind and you're almost forced to conquer other empires which will instantly kick your own pop growth down even more, making it even more important to conquer everyone around you.

You realise that population growth is a very complex thing in reality that is nothing like what it is in the game. Economy in real life is VERY different than what it is in the game too... in the game population are basically production and secondly population is a maintenance cost.... in the real world with modern technology production and mining of resources are more or less decoupled from population and consumption is an economic driving engine, this will change as resources become more abundant (from space mining for example). Production in the real world are mainly limited by energy and resources and not population.

Population for the sake of having it in the real world is not really a thing... reproduction is a social thing. Once a society becomes self sustainable there is little reason to grow in size, abundance of resources can just be enjoyed better as well. You see this in many societies even if population density is very low... some nations here on Earth who have the lowest population density and still more or less a flat population growth while some of the most population dense areas have a high population growth.

There are many reasons for why population have high or low population growth... but it is true as far as we understand that population will eventually stop growing once they become self sustainable and have advanced enough technology for medicine and resource abundance. Even physical fertility start to drastically decrease which have been hard to explain why (there are many theories).

Even if you had half of the population of Earth migrate to other planets you probably would not see a high boom in growth rate in the population that stay behind, just more space and resources for the ones left as there is plenty enough people on Earth for a self sustainable society to remain. Although if there are enough colonies out there you would likely see a large boom in population growth on each individual colony as each one would like to grow to a certain size and complexity to be self sustainable and then you would see the same thing on them to.

As space in reality in practical terms mean infinite resources (unlike a computer game) there are no reason for human populations to grow unless it is to find that critical mass for cultural and technological progress in a self sustainable way. My guess would be that it all would depend on how much contact and trade there would be between colonies. The more frequent contact and trade are the less population would have a need to grow even in those scenarios as they all are connected in one large culture and society anyway.

When resources becomes practically infinite (from space) and so cheap anyone can have anything they want then economy become very different and consumption becomes moot as an economic indicator, thus more population is not necessary to grease the wheels anymore.

The game is just a game... you can make any rational justification for any position. To me it makes sense that population growth would become slower and slower as a specific society grows. But it also is a good game mechanic for balancing the game in general... so well done there. There still is an issue with more planets/habitats equal faster growth, this issue is still there unfortunately. Now you just manage it with limiting the jobs and having planet capacity high enough and the use the automatic resettlement to resettle jobless POP to planets that still need POP.... if you lack them just create more places to place them.

 

[TGK72]

Well, whatever your head canon is, it's far more realistic than the previous linear curve.

Populations have a tendency to boom when economic, technologic, and housing factors make more children easier to support and provide for, and then starts to slow down when the population starts to reach the soft limit created by those three factors. Housing gets more expensive as there's less of it, food rises in demand and gets more expensive.

Plus as it's always been since 1.0, pops are extremely abstract. Whatever way they decide to do pop growth is never going to be perfect because pops are not trying to be exact anyway. One pop for one species is going to be a different number than one pop for another and these pop numbers could also change in size depending on technology how far ahead you are along in the future, what strata they are in, and what you can theoretically support if they were a real number.

So honestly this current growth model is probably the best we're going to get in terms of realism because there's really no way we can make it realistic since we're not using real population numbers.

 

[GnoSIS]

I don't get why this discussion keeps going on. Unit pop is of undisclosed size. if it was 1B before 3.0, now it's bigger i.e. 2B each.

For all I care, PDX can code a population readout on the GUI and multiply units by size to make people feel better. Beyond that, the rest of the issues are software/implementation centric.

There you go. problem solved.

 

[A2ch0n]

It is a bad mechanic that makes tall, isolationist or pacifist playstyles less viable by introducing a point in the campaign where internal development will make you fall behind and you're almost forced to conquer other empires which will instantly kick your own pop growth down even more, making it even more important to conquer everyone around you.

I'm a parcifist player by myself and i'm not sure that your statement is correct. The popgrowth decline is measured by the single empire with the most pops if i understood that correct. So that implies that a empire that is big and has conquered a lot of space has increadibly slow pop growth compared to all empires with less pops. So if you actually not at your carrying capacity for all of your planets you should have a really good growthrate and most likely catch up after a acceptable time (like all other empires too). The only real blocking factor is as said the carrying capacity. So if you still build habitats and ringworlds there is most likely no real difference. And against AI it will never matter.
Of course, maybe i'm wrong. But that is how i understood the new pop system. In three hours we know more!

 

[Me_]

I can’t really think of a reason it would work this way in-universe. I guess maybe the empire overstretches it’s food supply or something?

The in-universe reason is that the in-game universe is a game.

 

[InvisibleBison]

There is, and can be, no in-universe explanation for this mechanic, because it relates to pops. Pops are purely a gameplay contrivance, with no in-universe explanation, and so any mechanic that involves them also can't have any in-universe explanation.

 

[Less2]

Increased (non-specified resource) overhead for a growing empire and demographic transition are probably some of the better in-game explanations.

While demographic transition wouldn't usually apply to gestalt empires, they could still be affected by the increased overhead for attending to a larger populace. Hive minds need to spend more attention dealing with infrastructural needs, and machine intelligences could start facing performance issues, needing to spend more assembly resources maintaining their population.

It wouldn't make any sense for this to follow along the lines of political borders. IRL luxembourg doesn't have a huge growth rate because the # of people in its borders are small. Similarly if the US suddenly broke up into 50 states we wouldn't expect some massive birth rate climb until there were >300M people in every individual state for it to go back to normal.

Ironically it actually would make more sense in gestalt empires if we assume some kind of cost to adding consciousness past a point combined with some theoretical limit on the ability of a hivemind to process.

 

[Jorgen_CAB]

It wouldn't make any sense for this to follow along the lines of political borders. IRL luxembourg doesn't have a huge growth rate because the # of people in its borders are small. Similarly if the US suddenly broke up into 50 states we wouldn't expect some massive birth rate climb until there were >300M people in every individual state for it to go back to normal.

Ironically it actually would make more sense in gestalt empires if we assume some kind of cost to adding consciousness past a point combined with some theoretical limit on the ability of a hivemind to process.

To me it makes very little sense to have much of any sentient drones at all in a robot society as they really serve a very little purpose aside for the ones you need to run things (intelligent ones). Machines really don't need much of any sentient beings at all... just sapient central computers and then specialised robotic vehicles (non sentient) to do all the work. The amount of sentient computers would depend on how much machinery they could control.

I also often have a problem what a Hive mind really is and how it works... how does the communication work and how independent is each "individual" in the hive?!?

Are they more like ants... so no real hive "mind" just ants randomly doing things based on instinct and following different scents... then how do they span the galaxy?!?

I know... this is just sci-fi and it is cool over logic anyway... but still...

 

[DreadLindwyrm]

To me it makes very little sense to have much of any sentient drones at all in a robot society as they really serve a very little purpose aside for the ones you need to run things (intelligent ones). Machines really don't need much of any sentient beings at all... just sapient central computers and then specialised robotic vehicles (non sentient) to do all the work. The amount of sentient computers would depend on how much machinery they could control.

I also often have a problem what a Hive mind really is and how it works... how does the communication work and how independent is each "individual" in the hive?!?

Are they more like ants... so no real hive "mind" just ants randomly doing things based on instinct and following different scents... then how do they span the galaxy?!?

I know... this is just sci-fi and it is cool over logic anyway... but still...

Different Hive Minds work in different ways, according to the headcanon of the gamer.

Some will be on a model where there's essentially one "sapient directing intelligence" per pop, but all are subservient to the Hive as a whole - somewhat like the tyranid synapse beasts of earlier editions of 40k (kill the synapse beast, and the non-sapient drones basically go wild until another synapse beast can gather them up and make them useful. Presumably these are still using the psychic connection thing.
Some will be on a model where there's one controller per planet, answering to the sector brain bug, answering to the Hive, with the connections being psychic shenanigans that reaches across space. However, the individual planets here could be functionally ant colonies.
Some will be "one brain, many bodies", with every body directly being part of the Overmind.
Some will be more like a direct democracy, with everything the Hive must do as a whole being decided by an instant consensus of all parts. All drones in this model would be sapient, but dependent on the Hive for existence (early Borg), and might even be able to cope with the concept of "I" referring to a single drone, even if "I" is always subservient to "we".

For robot empires, I've generally considered each POP unit to be the machines subservient to a particular mid-tier command node which has been specialised for a particular purposes (whether overseeing manufacturing, mining, energy production, etc.), with the majority of the POP being non-sapient workers controlled by that command node (which might even have a "name"!). The planet or sector "governor" is then a high-tier command node that directs the POP command nodes.

 

[TrotBot]

I can’t really think of a reason it would work this way in-universe. I guess maybe the empire overstretches it’s food supply or something?

Because more developed societies have lower birthrates. Poor people tend to want to have as many children as possible, for help with farm labour, as their retirement plan, and because so many die along the way. In these societies families may have upwards of ten. More developed societies are much more likely to have one or none.

 

[dsteve3]

Yeah slowing down poo growth in certain areas. Especially as you massively increase your development. Never had that anywhere in real life.

exactly opposite - real-world population growth exactly mirrors this phenomenon - the more developed a society, the slower the growth, and inversely societies that are intentionally destabilized and afflicted with developmental inhibitants have much larger population growth.

Your not thinking like a human living in the real world. High-society has high costs - children are notoriously expensive. Devalued societies that have been driven to sub-normal levels resort to ... "making babies" ... to deal with their situation.

Don't laugh - its true.

 

[InvisibleBison]

Because more developed societies have lower birthrates. Poor people tend to want to have as many children as possible, for help with farm labour, as their retirement plan, and because so many die along the way. In these societies families may have upwards of ten. More developed societies are much more likely to have one or none.

Development isn't correlated with population.

 

[Less2]

Because more developed societies have lower birthrates. Poor people tend to want to have as many children as possible, for help with farm labour, as their retirement plan, and because so many die along the way. In these societies families may have upwards of ten. More developed societies are much more likely to have one or none.

exactly opposite - real-world population growth exactly mirrors this phenomenon - the more developed a society, the slower the growth, and inversely societies that are intentionally destabilized and afflicted with developmental inhibitants have much larger population growth.

Your not thinking like a human living in the real world. High-society has high costs - children are notoriously expensive. Devalued societies that have been driven to sub-normal levels resort to ... "making babies" ... to deal with their situation.

Don't laugh - its true.

Why do people keep parroting this asinine "fact" that has nothing to do with the mechanic at hand?

If the proposition was that every tech should add +1 to the growth needed for new pops, then sure, this would work (and would make FEs make sense). That is not the case here.

 

[TrotBot]

Why do people keep parroting this asinine "fact" that has nothing to do with the mechanic at hand?

If the proposition was that every tech should add +1 to the growth needed for new pops, then sure, this would work (and would make FEs make sense). That is not the case here.

Yes well not sure why you insist on adding more calcs. "You're already big" is good enough approximation. It also doesn't STOP your growth, it just does what empire sprawl was meant to do and slows it down again as you get big.