How population growth SHOULD work

[Journeyman Prime]

Lets start by separating Carrying Capacity from Growth Capacity. Growth of a population in a vacuum is determined solely by a combination of the current population size and how many children the average member of the group feels it can handle/wants. Thus a planet's "natural" (aka non-immigration) growth should be determined FIRST by the number of pops on the planet and SECOND by its genetic traits related to growth. This mimics the natural curve of exponential growth we see IRL. The fewer people, the slower the growth. The more people, the higher the growth. Purely for the sake of example, lets say that under this system I'm proposing, every pop adds an arbitrary number of 0.20 monthly pop growth, meaning every 5 pops of THAT SPECIES on the planet produce an additional 1.00 of monthly pop growth FOR said species, with the base growth in the game being 0.20 per month. This means that 1-pop planets will rely entirely on immigration or resettlement for pop growth, just like IRL.

However, this figure is not the true growth of a population, it is better to think of it as Growth Capacity, aka how many children people WOULD have if space available was infinite, or rather if real estate was literally FREE. But no population exists in a vacuum like this (except in a place that somehow has infinite available space, like a Birch World). This is where Carrying Capacity comes in. Under this system, Carrying Capacity is used to calculate by how much the Growth Capacity of the planet's population would be REDUCED in order to produce the ACTUAL growth rate, and this would be the number that is actually added to the pop growth on a monthly basis. High enough CC=no growth reduction while low CC=heavy growth reduction culminating in the population ceasing to grow and stabilizing around replacement rates once the planet's CC has been reached.

Under this system there would be NO UPPER LIMIT on GROWTH CAPACITY except for how many pops you can cram into a planet and still have enough Carrying Capacity left over to not shoot that Growth Capacity into the ground. For example, if you can somehow cram 100 pops onto a planet and still have a low enough CC that your planet's GC remains unaffected by the CC growth reduction, then your actual pop growth=your Growth Capacity. This is a very extreme example that in-game would only be accomplished by modding housing buildings to produce 40 housing each and filling the slots with them, but it gives you a visualization of what I'm talking about. In reality, with proper game balancing in place, things are much less extreme.

Under this system, Rapid Breeders and Slow Breeders would directly affect Growth Capacity. Rapid Breeders would increase Growth Capacity of pops of that species by an arbitrary number like 0.05, meaning that every 4 pops of a Rapid Breeder species produces an additional 1.00 monthly pop Growth Capacity. Meanwhile Slow Breeders would do just the opposite, reducing Growth Capacity so that every 6 pops of that species on the planet boosts pop Growth Capacity by 1.00. This IS more realistic, especially compared to the current system which is STILL FLAT GROWTH rates and not actually exponential growth.

Immigration works somewhat outside of this system however. It is factored into a planet's Growth Capacity after "natural" growth but before Carrying Capacity is brought in to reduce Growth Capacity to produce actual pop growth. Immigration growth would be calculated based on housing available, jobs available, and planetary stability, and would be limited to an arbitrary number, or a number based on something about the planet perhaps. The planet's immigration authority can only process so many applications per month after all.

Under this system, the planets with the largest populations, developed specifically to facilitate high growth would be mostly unable to produce anything other than Trade, Unity, and Research since all or most of their districts would be taken by cities. Only these worlds would be able to get the kind of "ridiculous" growth rates I'm sure you are already furiously typing about in the replies, while actual production hubs that produce things like alloys and CGs, or even just minerals, food, and energy would be far more limited in growth once their jobs have been filled out and available housing has dropped. This would be pretty accurate to IRL civilizations, as most population centers of a civilization tend to also be its trade hubs, cultural centers, and house most of its research efforts. All this system would require is careful balancing to ensure that in the majority of cases, excluding things like Ecus, Ring Worlds, or Birch Worlds, growth will be only slightly higher than before.

Yes if you turn a size 25 planet into an Ecu and then fill all of its districts with cities and then stuff 100 pops onto it you will get incredible growth, but that's just realistic. You will never ever in real life have a population of such size with so much room to grow into and the economic ability to actually support that growth (a family costs money/resources after all) only produce birth rate that is equivalent to a population literally half its size in the same scenario. That is essentially the level of stupidity of the current pop growth rate cap of 6. Doesn't matter if your species is Rapid Breeders or Slow Breeders, you can, with enough work, achieve that growth rate of 6, and it'll just stop there.

Population growth increases exponentially, and incorporating that into Stellaris would go a long way towards making the game immersive and more fun to play, as well as fixing some of the problems a considerable portion of the fanbase (as evidenced by the number of posts I see here and elsewhere) are having with this new, hobbled, and backwards system. If the devs don't do it, I hope someone in the modding community takes the initiative. I would do it myself, but I've tried modding before with bad results, and I'm frankly too busy with all of the nonsense going on these days to learn it.

[Cato]

This is from what I can see a good idea

[Kriss]

Do not give paradox ideas... They will butcher the game even more...

At least modders will do the job of the paid emploees...

[lubed_assassin]

why is everyone so fancy with solutions... all they had to do was cut pop growth in half and jobs in half, while doubling the output..

each building had two jobs prior already, just cut it down to one.

[papa nurgle's pizza]

"This means that 1-pop planets will rely entirely on immigration or resettlement for pop growth, just like IRL."
If a planet only has 1 pop, that doesn't mean that there is only a single individual on the planet lmao
It just means that there aren't many people there

[RodHull]

Publicado originalmente por MayhemX8:

snip

All of this rather ignores why they made this change. Although they mention balancing playstyles of wide and tall, the primary reason for this change was to increase late game performance, which is the No1 complained about thing in Stellaris for literally years now. Now we can absolutely have a debate about if this was the correct way to deal with that issue. But this is what they chose to deal with the issue. So your elegant solution wouldn't really address this problem, unfortunately.

[Journeyman Prime]

Publicado originalmente por lubed_assassin:

why is everyone so fancy with solutions... all they had to do was cut pop growth in half and jobs in half, while doubling the output..

each building had two jobs prior already, just cut it down to one.

Not a bad idea. I don't know why when they switched over from tiles they made 1 district=2 tiles. 1 District should logically have equalled 1 tile, aka 1 job and 1 housing, with cities producing 1 clerk job and 3 housing.

[Journeyman Prime]

Publicado originalmente por RodHull:

Publicado originalmente por MayhemX8:

snip

All of this rather ignores why they made this change. Although they mention balancing playstyles of wide and tall, the primary reason for this change was to increase late game performance, which is the No1 complained about thing in Stellaris for literally years now. Now we can absolutely have a debate about if this was the correct way to deal with that issue. But this is what they chose to deal with the issue. So your elegant solution wouldn't really address this problem, unfortunately.

Except it would. It modulates pop growth based on space available instead of making pop growth consistent and flat. So when your planet has lots of space and jobs, growth skyrockets, only to plummet back down when you run out.

If they actually wanted to reduce end-game lag, they wouldn't ♥♥♥♥ around with pop growth, they'd just reduce the Galactic Pop Capacity by changing districts to=1 housing and 1 job, then double the resources from jobs.

[Rangoric]

Population growth, while a function of current population, isn't as clean as you make it out to be. Look at rich couples, even just billionaires in the US and look at their number of children.

But there is a piece I like about your idea, but quite a bit that doesn't work for me. Having exponential growth wouldn't be more immersive. It would be less. Exponential growth is HUGE and it would make population growth king, and requires too many assumptions to be an actual thing. Which can be fine, but let's make people work for it ;)

But let's work from that and go into why I don't like your idea completely.

Immersive minds know that having 2 people do a single thing doesn't always double the output. With 2 people you need more space, more coordination, more resources. There's a whole book on it. So let's have each pop represent a larger number of people per planet. So the people on the planet can influence the pop to get larger, but it will slow down over time unless you focus on it. That sounds about right.

If you had a birch world, that is effectively infinite space, it would grow at about the same rate the whole time. The game measures time in days/months/years, and this is over 300 years in a normal game. In 200 years humans went from 1 billion to 7 billion. With an estimated high of ~16 billion by 2100 so that's 1 to 16 population units in the space of 300 years.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population)

Even if you quadruple that rate, you're at 64 population for 300 years in game.

Also on that page you'll see that world population isn't exponential, it's linear, with a changing curve around just after WWII, and was fairly slow before then.

So it seems like it'd make sense, but outside factors like space (+), food (+), wealth (- or +) and just plain time. In the US with college becoming more common and other complications, it's pushed the average age of first child up almost 10 years which can effectively be a -50% pop growth (20, 20, 20 v 30, 30, 30 is 60 years vs. 90 years for the same growth, and now the life expectancy starts to matter for the one with the 50% penalty the first group doesn't even have anyone hitting retirement age yet).

Exponential growth assume immortals. The growth rate on earth was fairly linear even around WWI/WWII.

I think your change swings way too far the other way.

What I like about your idea is that population plays a role (where now it doesn't) but exponential isn't what I'd want to see. Civilization does this well in that the more you have on food the faster your population will grow, but slows over time for that city. Stellaris could use a job instead. Let the cloning vats be less cloning focused and let multiple be built on a planet. Population growth needs coordination of resources, so the reduction in production of usable resources to get more pops feels nice. We already specialize planets for just about every other resource, so why not population growth?

IMO the change needed for the current live system that I'd like is to make it a galactic slowdown instead of an empire slowdown, and be influenced by habitable planets, to account for map size/planet density, and then purge/assimilate are closer and you have some nobs to make it better. To remove it the limit I'd want the cut pops in half along with jobs then double production per pop, or similar. I've had 5k+ pops before. I'm liking that I can get more production out of fewer pops, less for me to deal with. I don't mind the slowdown, I do mind that growth falls off a cliff, and isn't influenced by how big or how populatable the galaxy is. I also dislike how opaque the system is. Everything else I can see numbers, but growth is just like "here you go good luck!".

With feeder planets, and how well the auto migration works, the main issue I'm seeing is your empire size doesn't matter for growth, just empire population. Which makes balance of things all over the place REALLY off. So off that I'm starting to think the pop growth rate reducers are a good idea for next time because the best ways to get new pops are so much better that conquering/assimilating and related activities are way better.

Lithoids I'm finding are good, because nobody wasted on food and the growth penalty gets eaten, but I'm also Necrophage raiders, so not really a good trial. ME are GREAT because Machine Empires have fewer wasted pops, No pops for food or commercial goods makes a much larger difference when population is cut to a fraction of what it was once you hit the magic number.

[Journeyman Prime]

Exponential population growth would not make population growth king if you incorporate Carrying Capacity into it. Because at the end of the day, a size 25 planet is a size 25 planet, and its carrying capacity remains the same unless you increase its size. Under my system, population growth is actually TRIVIALIZED with regards to the long term. All that higher population growth does is bring your planets online faster, giving you an economic advantage in the short term, which you would have to capitalize on to make its effects more long-term. Under my system everyone's planets cap out at their maximum CC, and if the game goes on long enough, it actually doesn't matter how fast they got to that point if the owner didn't capitalize on it at the time. In this system all that higher pop growth would give you is a temporary advantage, how long it lasts depends on how much pop growth everyone else is getting. Eventually your planet will reach max cap and be unable to grow anymore pops. Once that is done that economic and diplomatic advantage lasts only until your opponent reaches their own cap.

The concept of rich people having fewer kids is a meme. Rich people in our society have fewer kids because of our culture, which tends towards greed and selfishness. In ancient societies with less decadent cultures you had as many kids as you could afford to feed, and often had them work under you once they were old enough in order to increase the family's wealth, usually to support even more kids or grandkids. If people were required to have 40% of their corporation's employees as their family and children I guarantee you people would be breeding like mad, rich or not. People have this dumb idea in their heads that our culture and society is the way it has always been, and therefore everything that happens in it denotes some universal law. This could not be farther from the case.

[Journeyman Prime]

Publicado originalmente por Rangoric:

Population growth, while a function of current population, isn't as clean as you make it out to be. Look at rich couples, even just billionaires in the US and look at their number of children.

But there is a piece I like about your idea, but quite a bit that doesn't work for me. Having exponential growth wouldn't be more immersive. It would be less. Exponential growth is HUGE and it would make population growth king, and requires too many assumptions to be an actual thing. Which can be fine, but let's make people work for it ;)

But let's work from that and go into why I don't like your idea completely.

Immersive minds know that having 2 people do a single thing doesn't always double the output. With 2 people you need more space, more coordination, more resources. There's a whole book on it. So let's have each pop represent a larger number of people per planet. So the people on the planet can influence the pop to get larger, but it will slow down over time unless you focus on it. That sounds about right.

If you had a birch world, that is effectively infinite space, it would grow at about the same rate the whole time. The game measures time in days/months/years, and this is over 300 years in a normal game. In 200 years humans went from 1 billion to 7 billion. With an estimated high of ~16 billion by 2100 so that's 1 to 16 population units in the space of 300 years.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population)

Even if you quadruple that rate, you're at 64 population for 300 years in game.

Also on that page you'll see that world population isn't exponential, it's linear, with a changing curve around just after WWII, and was fairly slow before then.

So it seems like it'd make sense, but outside factors like space (+), food (+), wealth (- or +) and just plain time. In the US with college becoming more common and other complications, it's pushed the average age of first child up almost 10 years which can effectively be a -50% pop growth (20, 20, 20 v 30, 30, 30 is 60 years vs. 90 years for the same growth, and now the life expectancy starts to matter for the one with the 50% penalty the first group doesn't even have anyone hitting retirement age yet).

Exponential growth assume immortals. The growth rate on earth was fairly linear even around WWI/WWII.

I think your change swings way too far the other way.

What I like about your idea is that population plays a role (where now it doesn't) but exponential isn't what I'd want to see. Civilization does this well in that the more you have on food the faster your population will grow, but slows over time for that city. Stellaris could use a job instead. Let the cloning vats be less cloning focused and let multiple be built on a planet. Population growth needs coordination of resources, so the reduction in production of usable resources to get more pops feels nice. We already specialize planets for just about every other resource, so why not population growth?

IMO the change needed for the current live system that I'd like is to make it a galactic slowdown instead of an empire slowdown, and be influenced by habitable planets, to account for map size/planet density, and then purge/assimilate are closer and you have some nobs to make it better. To remove it the limit I'd want the cut pops in half along with jobs then double production per pop, or similar. I've had 5k+ pops before. I'm liking that I can get more production out of fewer pops, less for me to deal with. I don't mind the slowdown, I do mind that growth falls off a cliff, and isn't influenced by how big or how populatable the galaxy is. I also dislike how opaque the system is. Everything else I can see numbers, but growth is just like "here you go good luck!".

With feeder planets, and how well the auto migration works, the main issue I'm seeing is your empire size doesn't matter for growth, just empire population. Which makes balance of things all over the place REALLY off. So off that I'm starting to think the pop growth rate reducers are a good idea for next time because the best ways to get new pops are so much better that conquering/assimilating and related activities are way better.

Lithoids I'm finding are good, because nobody wasted on food and the growth penalty gets eaten, but I'm also Necrophage raiders, so not really a good trial. ME are GREAT because Machine Empires have fewer wasted pops, No pops for food or commercial goods makes a much larger difference when population is cut to a fraction of what it was once you hit the magic number.

Ok, I read this entire thing and you seem to have either not read half of my post, or have missed the point entirely. You claim that pop growth on Earth has been linear, but fail to factor in that the world's governments haven't been covering Earth in cities to make real estate dirt cheap, because they don't have the economy to support those empty cities without crashing said economy. You also claim exponential growth assumes immortals. This is wrong. Yes death rates do factor in, but in any society like the kind we see in Stellaris, death rates have been reduced to a point where they are a pittance of birth rates, even in harsher societies.

You then go on to suggest the very things I offered in my post with regards to carrying capacity being used to limit the Maximum Galactic population, which would be increased only through Ring Worlds and Habitats in vanilla. modded is not even to be considered as its a choice to use mods.

Try and read my post again buddy, you missed a good deal of stuff and are just wrong about others.