Why have a fast growing population?

More pop = more money later in the game, when taxes are raised. Most good players expand quickly and deplete the home world population faster than it grows. If you have plenty on the home world, there is a chance you are not cranking out colony ships fast enough. It is good to have at least one billion on each colony so that each of them gets full pop growth too. Again, it will mean more more money later in the game.

The other use for pop is troops to load on transports.

Again, keep approval at 100% with lower taxes for the first 20 turns of the game or so. The increase in pop will pay off big time later in the game and cost only a few credits early. If the homeworld is getting too full, you probably aren't building colony ships fast enough. Rush two factories early, if necessary, to jump start production of colony ships and other buildings.

money, money, money, money, influence, money, troops.

Just watch how the Torians always come to be powerful in most games.

Each billion people was worth about 14bc taxes at 100% tax rate on a previous test. That's 7bc at 50%, and so on.

On a test just now, I took a game with no money modifiers up to 10.013pop, and then set tax at 100%, but it showed 241bc income (24.1bc/pop), then I remembered I set difficulty to cakewalk for the test.

This suggests that the difficulty level adjusts income per population for the player.

Another thing about higher population planets, they can fend off multiple enemy troop transports. With 5B on a planet you will be lucky to resist one transport. With 15B you can take on 2-3 without much problem, especially if you have some planetary defenses. 15B is where I like to keep my planets at. They still only need one entertainment building along with a stock market or two to keep them happy at 80% taxes.

The only reason I buy for raising your population is taxes. You're not going to empty your home planet with colony ships unless you build more than ten of them. That's a Large or larger universe. And I don't even staff my colonies with 500 -- I put 100 on them. Reasons:

#1 -- Population locked in colony ships isn't growing or paying taxes.
#2 -- My Econ capital goes on Earth. Therefore my population should stay on Earth.
#3 -- Every game, I convert some colony ships to constructors and lose their population.

I would believe the transport reason if the enemy would ever declare war on me and move transports toward my planets. The way it is it either never declares (Masochistic) or declares when it's so overwhelmingly powerful I can't field a single ship and give up. Or if your population is high enough can you survive by ground fighting in that scenario? In GalCiv I you could not.

Hi!

keep approval at 100% with lower taxes for the first 20 turns of the game or so.

That's a very good advice. To explain why, I have to explain the mechanics behind pop growth (check also wikipedia)
1. Pop grows by 3% or 75 million, whichever is smaller.
2. Approval bonuses are applied after the basic growth is calculated, so with 100% approval you get double the pop, 6% or 150M, whichever is smaller.
3. Now the growth bonuses are applied, so with the 10% additional growth you get 6.6% or 165M pop, whichever is smaller.

Apply that on your 5B Homeworld, and you can fill each second turn a colonizer with 330M pop, without depleting the HW of pop. That means every colony will start with lots of pop == out of "hole"faster == lots of revenue earlier.

BR, Iztok

Fast growing population is also important if you want to invade a lot of planets.

1. Pop grows by 3% or 75 million, whichever is smaller.

That seems too low. I was finding the cap at 200M odd without race bonuses and below 75% morale. Have they nerfed population growth still further in 1.2?

Or if your population is high enough can you survive by ground fighting in that scenario?

Not a chance. The attacker gets too much soldiering boost and the population loss doesn't seem to depend that much on the defending population. So those 500M troops will take down 1B or more whether you have 3B on the planet or 30B.

This suggests that the difficulty level adjusts income per population for the player.

Nope. Taxes are independent of difficulty level. They're based on the square root of the population, which is why you found the difference. On the higher levels it's a very good idea to micromanage populations by transporting people between your planets. All other things being equal, you'll get substantially more income from splitting 10B population between two planets than from having 9.5B on one and the 500M of the initial colony on the other.

Hi!

> 1. Pop grows by 3% or 75 million, whichever is smaller. That seems too low.I was finding the cap at 200M odd without race bonuses and below 75% morale. Have they nerfed population growth still further in 1.2?

I don't have the 1.2 version loaded. Ther were some nasty bugs mentioned on forums, so I opted to not upgrade my 1.11 version.

Note that 3% or 75M is base pop growth. Now add there aphrodisiacs (+50%), 70% starting bonus + 10% from universalists and 100% approval bonus and you get 75M * 1.50 * 1.80 * 2.00 = 405 million new pop, and that is the ultimate pop gowth cap (without anomalies and events). With my usuall starting +20% bonus and all other mentioned bonuses my race can still grow 270 mil pop. And I too do lots of pop MM - an old habit from Stars!, stil quite usefull here.

BR, Iztok

What is the higest approval rating that affects population growth? 70% right? Thats what I saw on some table i downloaded.

#2 -- My Econ capital goes on Earth. Therefore my population should stay on Earth.

It's more lucrative to wait until you find a very high PQ planet to build an economic capital. Fill a class 30 with farms, eco capital and stock markets and it'll make a trillion or more credits per turn later in the game. You can't do that on the homeworld, because it rarely gets any higher than class 14 (except for Thala).