How to choose which populations to colonize with?

[SatanBless]

Question as in the title. How do you choose or control which populations get picked up to colonize with on a planet that has multiple races?

Example, I want to colonize an independent akdarian world, and I happen to have a colony with 3 billion akdarians, and also 700 million humans. I build my colony ship, tell it to load, and it loads mostly humans with very little akdarians, and I can't seem to unload the colonists or ask the game to load specifically only akdarians, since humans have a -31 suitability with the akdarian deep ocean world I want to colonize and it makes no sense for them to go there.

I do have migration controls set to manual and have humans on the other akdarian world set to be actively resettled, since again, the humans have a measely +1 suitability on that deep ocean world, while the akdarians have +31, so it makes no sense for there to be almost a billion humans (And I noticed the happiness and revenue increase while moving the humans off, so it seems having wrong populations on planets has a significant effect on support cost, which is a little hard to be able to see at a glance).

Perhaps it loads primarily humans because of that, but even so, I do not know how to control which race gets allowed on the colony ship to suit it to the destination.

[VoiD]

yeah, I found that weird too, colonized 2 continental planets and when I looked at them they were primarily Boskarans, and they hated the planet.

I might have to go through every planet I've colonized in the galaxy and manually set to eject bad races for each one of them(?)

[Spaceman_Spiff]

Void, if you have a majority of a certain type of world (like your homeworld type), choose one of them and set your pop policy on it, there is a button that lets you set for all colonies. Then you can go to the less common types and do those manually. Saves a bit of work if it's a huge empire. Don't forget to set population policies to Manual in your automation settings.

[VoiD]

Originally posted by Spaceman_Spiff:

Void, if you have a majority of a certain type of world (like your homeworld type), choose one of them and set your pop policy on it, there is a button that lets you set for all colonies. Then you can go to the less common types and do those manually. Saves a bit of work if it's a huge empire. Don't forget to set population policies to Manual in your automation settings.

Thanks, that makes it a bit better, but being a multiracial empire is still quite painful, I've annexed lots of independent colonies

[Spaceman_Spiff]

Yeah, I can understand. I noticed the problem early on, so now I am in the habit of changing a new colony's pop policies immediately upon gaining it. I just wish the suitability tooltip would list all of the races currently in your empire instead of just the races that already inhabit the planet.

[icedude94]

Yeah the tooltips need to be more helpful about which race has the best suitability for planets. I left my population policies on automatic and was dumb enough to agree to open migration as humans with an Ackdarian empire. Now I have Ackdarians coming to my low tax, high development worlds which aren't suitable for their race and it's driving my support costs out of control.

[h3retek]

nab here... where is the pop policy button / setting?

[icedude94]

When you have a colony selected, there's a little icon that looks like outlines of 3 people next to the population growth percentage.

[bri]

There appears to be some bugginess in the automated colonization system. Every time I try to use it the colony ship gets built at the farthest planet and tries to load up the wrong kind of settlers (because said furthest planet has the wrong kind of settlers). Until this is noted as being addressed in a patch I'd recommend handling colonization manually.

[h3retek]

oh, and btw, I have found that if you select the planet and just que it, then the colony ship gets auto-built and it "mostly" picks up the correct pop.

I think the colony ship takes the "main" pop of the planet you pick up... so, in my case, even though there were Fish Geckos on the planet, they were on the Lizardmen planet... so then the colony ship just picks up lizardmen, instead of the Fish Geckos.... and then dropped the Lizardmen pop on a Deep Ocean planet... and they decided to only max produce 200M pop and claim their own private beach resort. Which I guess is cool.

[h3retek]

Originally posted by icedude94:

When you have a colony selected, there's a little icon that looks like outlines of 3 people next to the population growth percentage.

This just sets it to manual.. I mean, where do I get the option to kick off the Lizardmen tourists?

[h3retek]

Originally posted by bri:

There appears to be some bugginess in the automated colonization system. Every time I try to use it the colony ship gets built at the farthest planet and tries to load up the wrong kind of settlers (because said furthest planet has the wrong kind of settlers). Until this is noted as being addressed in a patch I'd recommend handling colonization manually.

I think build location is based on your empires ability to build ships, I think it defaults to the best builder.

[icedude94]

You're clicking the set colony automation options button. Right next to where the population growth percentage is is the exact same icon only little. It will bring up the population policy window for that specific colony and has a button to apply it to all colonies if desired.

[h3retek]

Originally posted by icedude94:

You're clicking the set colony automation options button. Right next to where the population growth percentage is is the exact same icon only little. It will bring up the population policy window for that specific colony and has a button to apply it to all colonies if desired.

Jesus God Thank you sir! Two days...

[bri]

Originally posted by h3retek:

Originally posted by bri:

There appears to be some bugginess in the automated colonization system. Every time I try to use it the colony ship gets built at the farthest planet and tries to load up the wrong kind of settlers (because said furthest planet has the wrong kind of settlers). Until this is noted as being addressed in a patch I'd recommend handling colonization manually.

I think build location is based on your empires ability to build ships, I think it defaults to the best builder.

The only way that would be true in the cases I've seen is if it somehow thought my capital (and only planet with pop in excess of 1k million) that had no build order wasn't a better option than a 50k pop newly settled world that is still trying to build a spaceport because that was the exact choice it made in my most recent attempt. However, since I know it's an issue I just intercept the colonizer before it loads and manually load it at the appropriate planet. I'm sure I still lose out on travel time because it always chooses the most distant world but at least I get the right settlers...

[SatanBless]

I was already micromanaging my population controls, and manually building and loading colony ships at the right planet, the issue comes in when I have 2 pop types on 1 planet, such as a world with Teekans and a world with Dahyuts, which have the same suitability rating on that world so it is fine to have multiple pops there, but when you try to colonize, you cannot preference whether to fill the ship with Dahyuts or Teekans.

I had a situation where I wanted to colonize a planet forward so i could get access to better systems. It was a desert planet where my Teekans had a suitability of 21, and the dahyuts a -4. I tried multiple things, such as automatically letting the colonyship get filled by colonists, trying to do it manually, etc, but the ship always filled with dahyuts for whatever reason.

It had 50million dahyuts and 17 teekans on board. Literally 17. From a world that had about equal Dahyut and Teekans population. It wouldn't really be a problem if I only had pure worlds, but I didn't since I had a few worlds where the Teekans and Dahyuts had equal suitability, and getting the empire wide bonuses from the different pops is pretty good, so I kept it that way.

The new world was thus first colonized with Dahyuts, at -4 suitability, and was trash, but after a long time my manual pop management did fix it and the passenger ships had eventually resettled all the Dahyuts and replaced the population with Teekans lol. It currently has 34 million Teekans, and is steadily growing.

It's sort of funny that way, however it would safe a lot of time if you could just choose which pop should be loaded on the colony ship if you have worlds with multiple races living on it.