Population

It impacts your base output, although I cannot tell you the exact formula.    Your planetary improvements, for the most part, multiply this base output by a percentage.   Also your planet approval goes down as population goes up, which causes negative % modifiers to that base--which works against that base that just went up.   

We need a good plot of planetary output vs. population, adjusted for baseline approval modifiers.  Unfortunately I don't have that information in that detail.  What I do know is, the more structures you have which add to your base production (and there are a few), the more approval matters and the less population helps. 

Crusade or base game?  In Crusade, the population contribution to a planet's raw production is equal to the square root of the population.  If I remember correctly, in the base game it was equal to the population.

Thanks, I got it.  It is square root.

There is a population discussion over at the Steam forum where Frogboy made a suggestion how pop could work since a lot of people are not content with the square root formula.

I quote Frogboy here:

"I almost think what we should do is something like this:

Population = Production points.

and then you balance things around making population harder to increase.

So Earth, for example, has 7 (7 billion).

A new colony would have a pop cap of say 1 until you add cities which can increase them by a relatively small amount but.

The problem with having it be some exponent is that it's not intuitive to the player.

Thoughts?"

Here is what I would suggest (I made a suggestion elsewhere that buildings should need pop to work, but that doesn't prevent me from having other ideas ;)):

- Make 1 pop = 1 production, but only in one area. Make it so that you can move your pop between the four areas ship production, social production, research and wealth. Let the player configure a distribution ratio for those four areas so that new pop is distributed automatically according to the respective ratio and no user interaction is necessary every time. There you have back your wheel

- But: you cannot move people around as you wish! You cannot put a trained scientist to work as a bank accountant. So if you want to adjust existing production priorities you have to fetch those bank accountants from other planets where they already work in the economy, and that you have to do with mini freighters (which are attackable and need some time to reach their target.

- Population growth should not be linear, it should depend on your current population and available living quarters (aka pop cap). So let the growth factor be something like (x * Morale * (1 - current pop / pop cap)) %, the actual factor for x could depend on race traits and morale improvements. And example with x = 5, morale = 75%, current pop = 3, pop cap = 10:

Growth = 5 * 0.75 * (1 - 3 / 10) % = 5 * 0.75 * 0.7 % = 2.625 %, so pop would increase by 2.625 % * 3 = 0.07875 this turn.

That would also prevent colonizing planets with nearly empty colony ships because growth would take much too long.

As a compromise, I've modding the defs so that population produces raw production at X^.75 for crusade, instead of the default x^.5. The curve on X^.75 is such that it levels at about pop/2 once you get past 10 population, so you're not outproducing the galaxy with a single planet, but you get a boost early, when that extra +1 is really important. At levels below 10, it's about pop/1.3.

I use this with the expanded cities mod. Now, I have real reasons to spend some research on growth techs, population with the current crusade process no longer matters for invasion fleets or raw production past 9 on a planet.

Having population growth scale against available city space seems interesting. An easy way to do this might be an added bonus to growth, outside of any morale boosts, scaled on unused, but available city space on the planet. As you have less room to grow, the growth bonus shrinks.

I'm not a fan of square rooting the population, but I understand the point of diminishing returns as population goes up.  I think taxes and influence should stay linear with population, but apply diminishing returns to productivity; the idea being that benevolent ideologies are marked by high approvals, and ungodly high populations which do most of the work.  They exude money and influence.  Malevolent races just slash-and-burn, produce military, and they have to get their population by enslaving the benevolent races, who were able to grow their populations.   Population needs to matter again.

The idea is, benevolents struggle with productivity, so they have to buy it.  Or wage influence wars, without firing a shot.  Malevolents are fine with productivity, but they lack the population to take advantage of it, and have to go out and get it.  But they are vulnerable to the benevolents flipping them; and if they do, they sure have no problem leveraging that factory capacity. 

Thanks I see it now, raw production. I have Crusade now.