Food Question

Food is pretty important, since 1 food will let you grow 1 pop.  For now, 1 pop = 1 production, so you get a lot of raw production with high population planets.

Morale/Approval is a factor as well, since 100% approval gives you a 25% increase in production.  Higher population lowers your approval, so there's a balance there.

I aim for 100 pop per planet, but now that the Ultra-Terraformer is gone, it'll probably drop to around 60 each.  I generally lose approval until mid game, when the malevolent ideology trait can get me back to 100%.

Man, thats a lot of population! I usually shoot for about half that but maybe i am doing it wrong. On a planet that gets to say 14  I would typically end up with something like (ignoring things like hive at the moment & assuming specialization) : 1or 2 factories, 1 moral, 1 hospital (to be replaced later with irrigation), 1 ideology pt giver, 4 farms, & 5/6 labs/markets. Obviously planet layout can have a big impact on what you should do as do specialty buildings. 

Everyone has their own playstyles, so there isn't a wrong number for pop as long as it's high enough to supply transports and assist in production.

Snathi Prime (my homeworld) currently has a max pop of 64.5 and an actual pop of 32.1.  My other planets have lower max pops, averaging about 30 each.  I plan to take them all higher when I get more terraforming tech going.  It can't go much higher without the Ultra Terraformers, so I think we're all going to be limited to less than 100 per planet.  Growth is painfully slow so far and I can't seem to queue up birthing subsidies anymore.  I'll have to adjust my tactics to compensate.

I rarely build morale buildings and when I do, I only keep them for as long as I need them.  I prefer to have my morale boosters on starbases.  Late game, I no longer need those either and can maintain 100% morale with the malevolent ideology trait.

For ideology, I try to build all 3 buildings on each planet.  I can't do that with about 10 percent because of low PQ.  We have to be more careful how we build out now.

I still have specialized planets here and there, but the vast majority now are factories and farms.  I keep my global wheel at 10% econ, 45% each for manu and research.  That means I'm running a constant deficit economically.  With the Snathi, I'm actually gaining bcs per turn from their scavenging ability.  They became my favorite race, easily displacing the Thalans.  I might go back to 50/50 manu/research.

Holy crap! I've never taken a planet's population over 30... Looks like you're building a heck of a lot of farms and such. One of these games I'll have to try this approach out and see how it works for me and my play style.

Birthing subsidies got nerfed with the other projects, so getting super high populations will be pretty tough with non-artifical races.