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

[klingonadmiral]

Personally I start conquering and doing the other usuall midgame stuff by midgame, not wasting time juggling pops.

So what you're really saying is that Pacifist/Xenophiles are screwed.

Again.

 

[DanielPrates]

So what you're really saying is that Pacifist/Xenophiles are screwed.

Again.

I always felt that its a tradeoff, as friendlier civics make federarions and alliances easier. I usually expand more (though slowly) under pacifists then militarists.

 

[The Founder]

So what you're really saying is that Pacifist/Xenophiles are screwed.

Two words:
Migration Pact

Some other words:
That is the lot of the pacifist and has been since 1.0. Just not a lot of things to do without Warfare.

 

[Metztli]

For me personally the best system would be limited pops per planet + independent food source per planet + food convoys from your other worlds (if you want to speed up the growing of a colony or prevent a planet from starving) - basically how Endless Space 2 are currently doing it. In my opinion it makes the most sense to me and it will also reduce/put a cap on the number of pops in the galaxy.

 

[The Founder]

For me personally the best system would be limited pops per planet + independent food source per planet + food convoys from your other worlds (if you want to speed up the growing of a colony or prevent a planet from starving) - basically how Endless Space 2 are currently doing it. In my opinion it makes the most sense to me and it will also reduce/put a cap on the number of pops in the galaxy.

I have seen food transfer approaches used in a few games:
Star Drive 1+2
Endless Space 2 (totally forget it had that)
Distant Worlds could theoretically do it too (currently only cares for Strategic Resources). No idea where DW2 stands on this mater right now.

Personally I was never a fan. And the AI will be bad at playing with it as well, given it's inherent lack of planing ability.
And it is a bad idea to introduce a mechanic that the AI is so inherently disadvantaged at.

 

[Metztli]

I have seen food transfer approaches used in a few games:
Star Drive 1+2
Endless Space 2 (totally forget it had that)
Distant Worlds could theoretically do it too (currently only cares for Strategic Resources). No idea where DW2 stands on this mater right now.

Personally I was never a fan. And the AI will be bad at playing with it as well, given it's inherent lack of planing ability.
And it is a bad idea to introduce a mechanic that the AI is so inherently disadvantaged at.

If the main critique is that "possibly the AI will be bad with it", then it seems like a pretty good system to me. I believe that Paradox will be able to integrate it with their AI behavior.

 

[The Founder]

If the main critique is that "possibly the AI will be bad with it", then it seems like a pretty good system to me. I believe that Paradox will be able to integrate it with their AI behavior.

That is not how it works in practice.

AI has one absolute limit: It can not plan ahead. Not even one gametick. And there are plenty of mechanics where:
- you as a human do so little planning, you may not even be aware that you just did some planning
- require so much planning the AI has no hope of doing it

 

[currylambchop]

Yea, its clear this mechanic is a silly arbitrary attempt to control lag by removing fun, rather than by actually optimising your game, paradox. Please try another way to remove lag.

 

[The Founder]

Yea, its clear this mechanic is a silly arbitrary attempt to control lag by removing fun, rather than by actually optimising your game, paradox. Please try another way to remove lag.

Since you do know the secrets, how about you enlighten us?
I am sure Paradox - as well as Programmers and Mathematicians world wide - would love to hear your unique insights.
I too would love to have some progress on this front.

 

[currylambchop]

Since you do know the secrets, how about you enlighten us?
I am sure Paradox - as well as Programmers and Mathematicians world wide - would love to hear your unique insights.
I too would love to have some progress on this front.

Halve the base pop growth, Double pop output. There, 50% fewer pops late game.

 

[The Founder]

Halve the base pop growth, Double pop output. There, 50% fewer pops late game.

And you realy think that was not the first thing they tried?

It does not adress that population grows indefinitely anyway, forcing you to get more and more living space.

 

[currylambchop]

And you realy think that was not the first thing they tried?

It does not adress that population grows indefinitely anyway, forcing you to get more and more living space.

Population doesn't grow indefinitely anymore lol, that's the whole point of carrying capacity.

Besides the devs have made stupid decisions before, of course they could make another stupid decision.

 

[The Founder]

Population doesn't grow indefinitely anymore lol, that's the whole point of carrying capacity.

Besides the devs have made stupid decisions before, of course they could make another stupid decision.

The growth curve has no effect on Population Assembly.
Only the Growth Cost increase does.

 

[Kayden_II]

It does not adress that population grows indefinitely anyway, forcing you to get more and more living space.

And that's not even the topic of this thread your enlightenment. The problem here is that the colonies, its districts / buildings and its provided jobs don't get filled up with POPs fastly enough.

 

[The Founder]

And that's not even the topic of this thread your enlightenment. The problem here is that the colonies, its districts / buildings and its provided jobs don't get filled up with POPs fastly enough.

Or maybe you are still thinking in pre 3.0 terms and overbuild your planets?

Building Slots can stay empty until you need them.
Unused District Slots still add some capacity, so growth is not hindered (too much).

 

[Kayden_II]

Or maybe you are still thinking in pre 3.0 terms and overbuild your planets?

Oh sure, call it "overbuild". I call it "ready", because ...

Building Slots can stay empty until you need them.

It's called micro-management-reduction if you can do it in 2 steps instead "until you need them" or in the actual pre-3.0.1-case "until 5 newly grown POPs come in". You know ... micro-management-reduction, a major improvement that is luckily achieved now with V3.0.1. ... unless Paradox decides to screw their own achievement up again in order to punish it with a POP-growth-disadvantage. Anyways, the overall POP-growth is way too slow. And the ironic thing is that this change wasn't even that necessary anymore since Paradox has finally terminated this strange "5 newly grown POPs open up a new building-slot"-relation. You will quite wonder how many players will come to the conclusion that having even more POPs is pretty much useless if you can't fill them into productive jobs, ergo into districts / buildings, ergo into colonies ( habitable worlds, habitats, ring-worlds or ecus etc. ). That's where Paradox has to step in in order to balance the game. ( Like to finally address now the habitat-spam as well ) ! But just to slow down the POP-growth was dull as hell.

Unused District Slots still add some capacity, so growth is not hindered (too much).

BS. By the way, isn't this neglected the moment you "overbuild" your colony with city-districts ?

 

[High_Heavens]

Has anybody else tried a devouring swarm game yet? I'm rather glad I took engineered evolution and got some clone vats down early to try and offset not being able to steal other people's populations through war as most are mentioning. It does still feel now though that it's a case of feeding the 1 pop / 10 years or so growth from 100 planets back to 1 hive world in order to make it cost effective in a similar manner to ring worlds otherwise they're looking like their effectiveness has been massively nerfed unlike previous versions where I just hived close to everything

 

[The Founder]

It's called micro-management-reduction if you can do it in 2 steps instead "until you need them"

I call it "waste of Upkeep".

BS. By the way, isn't this neglected the moment you "overbuild" your colony with city-districts ?

And that is why I do not overbuild.

Maybe if I show you my planets, we can figure out what you are doing wrong to cause yourself such headaches?

Edit: Inserting as thumbnail does not seem to work. I try again with full image.

 

[Secret Master]

I just found out something that confuses me.

Apparently, you cannot have more than 1 POP assembly type on a planet. So, when my masters of evolution acquired the ability to build Clone Vats, I realized I already had robot assembly plants on all my planets.

So... which should I use? I'm locked into evolution mastery at this point, so I can't just decide to become robots.

The Clone Vats cost 2 energy and 30 food in upkeep for 3 POP assembly POP growth a month.

Robot Assembly Plants requires 1 POP in a job and 2 alloys a month for 2 POP growth a month. However, I have designed robots wit the Mass Produced trait (15% build speed) for an effective build speed of 2.3. I could redesign the robots to reduce their construction cost. My robots are droids right now.

It looks like Clone Vats are better, but robots would be more useful overall until I complete all the stuff involved with evolutionary mastery.

 

[Jarolleon]

I'd also argue, that there is such a thing as a push or pull by the percieved open-ness of space:

"Oh yeahy why not? Go ahead and have another two hatchlings with St. Knatchbull in the new colony over there on Applejack. By the time they're ripe they can make their fortune on the frontier like everyone. Space is the limit!"


vs.

"Have you gone humanshit? No, we won't have another one! There are almost no star systems left. They say they manifacture more rings, but how long can we keep that up? And don't get me started on this 'ecomenopolis' thing. I get claustrophobia just thinking about it."

If that was true then empire-wide carrying capacity would be a thing, which you could increase by settling more planets.

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.

Population was quite stagnant before the industrial revolution. Developing countries are just having their industrial-age growth spurt later, a growth spurt which ends by stagnating at a new effective carrying capacity like the West has. Also Russia has lower birthrates than the USA and it has an awful economy.

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.

Demographic transition is caused by the number of people under one flag increasing?

So the real reason Rome had to rely on the Foederati is because it got so big that it triggered demographic transition, thereby preventing its manpower reserves from recovering from disasters like the Antonine Plague & Crisis of the Third Century? Someone in this thread brought up small developed nations like Luxembourg as a counter-example to this theory, but if you view modern developed nations as autonomous subregions of the proto-UNE it does start to fit..