[Bug 1.3] synthetic population still broken

That is NOT a bug. It is currently working as intended. You can always artificially increase population by landing loaded colony ships or transports to the planet in question. It was this way back in GCII which allowed you to go over cap. Any race can do it. What needs is  a mechanism that slowly reduces pop as you are over cap.

Just make it so the added population above the cap doesn't count towards raw production. Easy fix. Makes no sense that these starving people (energy or food) would actually work productively anyways. 

That mechanism is there as well. The issue I find is that thanks to the assembly build project you can continuously go over. Just drop a point or two of population into a ship. Build a high end assembly. Drop population point down. Profit until the (very slow) mechanism reduces population down to max cap. Repeat ad infinitum.

Maybe I'm missing something, but in 1.2 I could simply construct new citizens ad nauseam . My home planet had 650 citizens at some point, as my morale would allow for it. I didn't transport them there, I just built them. Never noticed population going down, perhaps it did. My cap was 150 or something. Does 1.3 at least stop you from building past the cap?

As Ryat said, yes you can build above the cap, but you have to drop your pop below the cap first.  If you're the tiniest bit below the cap, you can build an assembly project to take you above it.  You can then offload the extra pop onto a transport or colony ship and build another assembly project. 

When you reach your desired pop, you can land the transports, reap the production benefits and send those transports to another planet to continue their nefarious deeds.

Your excess pop will start to die slowly, but the added production can make it worth your while.

This sounds like an exploit rather then a bug. It would be nice if they would do something about it, but if you want to work that hard to get around the rules, more power to you.

Yes, it's an exploit and not a bug.  You could still do it even if they "fixed" it.  You'd just have a lower starting pop to base it on.  

You can do this with the other races as well, but slower growth means it'll take longer.  

You are basically using your population as slave labor and working them to death. Sounds more like a governmental policy or strategical choice to me...

It's only an exploit if it's overpowered. Otherwise it's just a game strategy. If it's OP then nerf it. No reason to forbid it.

Ideally, the "die-off" mechanism should be proportional to the amount over popmax your current population is. If you land 100 pop in one turn, most of them should die on the next turn, then a few less the next turn, and so on.

Something like "50% of the excessive population dies off each turn, minimum of 0.2" would help to get around the exploit.

i like this idea but i dont think it goes far enough

first yes the extra population shouldent be able to work ... maybe the drengin or similar slave trading races can have a mechanic that allows them to get workers above pop cap but still have them die off over time

second i would add a morale penalty to having population above max cap something like whatever % of the population is above pop cap that is added as a morale malice after all other factors are calculated so if i have 100 morale due to artifacts and bonus's and everything else but have 10% of my population unemployed my morale is reduced to 90%

i know in the beta synthetic populations did not decrease and i think that was because population decay was essentially the opposite of population growth and since synthetic races had 0 population growth they had 0 decay im not sure if that was ever fixed

yep it was, not sure if its broken right now,

but its also only a 0.1 decrease per turn...

its in the GalCiv3GlobalDefs.xml, search for GrowthDecay

changing it to -1 should help with this