Population effect on cost of research

[fogandsteel]

I now have about 50 Pops, and they keep growing like crazy because I have 'Fast Breeders' trait and installed hydroponics facilities in my space ports.

It has significantly affected the cost of research, so my question is:

Is it more efficient to keep a smaller population which is working only the best tiles with the best buildings or should you strive to grow your population as much and as fast as possible as you would do, for example, in Civilization series?

[Drugal]

In civ you also get research penalty for having more cities. The key is always to find a balance.

Each pop above the first 10 increases tech cost by 2% so if you get to 35 pops and by doing so manage to increase your research output by more than 50% your are getting better, not as good as you would be if you get 50% more reaserch with 20 pops but still better than not growing at all.

Edit: Also remember that the things you research somhow need to be used to be worth anything. How good are bigger ship designs if you cant affort building or maintaing them? Why research a mining upgrade of 30% if replacing a lab with a mine would dobble your mining?

You need pops to have economy and you need economy to use your reseached techs.The mechanic encorrages you to keep expanding both econemy and research evenly.

[Deep One]

I tried to figure out the math of this and my finding is:

If you go from 10 pops to 11, assuming the same research per pop for simplicity, you would gain 10% more research, and your cost would go from 100% to 102%, a 2% increase and clearly a net benefit.

If you go from 1000 to 1001 pops, your research increase by 0.1%, and the cost increase by ~0.096%, so basically at large pop numbers you still gain a little bit of research speed but it gets closer and closer to equalizing out.

So the conclusion is that you definitely want to expand a bit in the beginning, say up to your core world limit, but then you only want to expand if you can do so while keeping your research per pop efficient. Conquering an unhappy other race that give you crappy research per pop for example will be a net loss.

[Rainer]

what are your base assumptions? how many labs per pops?

[zanaikin]

Here

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=690408110

It's really not hard to accomodate for the growing cost.

[jfoytek]

Originally posted by fognsteel:

I now have about 50 Pops, and they keep growing like crazy because I have 'Fast Breeders' trait and installed hydroponics facilities in my space ports.

It has significantly affected the cost of research, so my question is:

Is it more efficient to keep a smaller population which is working only the best tiles with the best buildings or should you strive to grow your population as much and as fast as possible as you would do, for example, in Civilization series?

Its just as bad on research to go wide in Civilization 5....

I am not saying to stop growing but I am saying don't grow only to grow... if your all about food and happiness and Fast breeding then you are definately growing at a faster rate then your research is...

Try to maintain research growth to match or exceed population growth...

[Regularity]

Keep in mind the dev diary said they're changing the research formula with the upcoming Clarke patch. Population will have a smaller impact on speed, but total planet count will now make up for that reduction.

[Crim]

There is a complicated math equation that economist use in real life to decide this, overall it goes something like this.

If 1 extra person can produce more Science than the 2% penalty, then you should make that extra person. Eventually there will be a break point, tho.

One of the changes in my mod was I reduced the penalty from 2% to 1.5%, I did this since one of the upcoming changes in the next patch was to reduce this value. So I jumped the gun a little.

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=689857065

[Regularity]

Originally posted by Talamare:

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=689857065

This is the 3rd or 4th thread I've seen you plug your mod in, you really have to stop doing that every time any sort of discussion of game mechanics comes up before you get reported for spam.

[Crim]

Originally posted by Regularity:

This is the 3rd or 4th thread I've seen you plug your mod in, you really have to stop doing that every time any sort of discussion of game mechanics comes up before you get reported for spam.

Altho, I contribute to every thread I post it in, it's not like I just post it randomly.

Here is a video on the idea behind it, watch starting at 7:10 or so

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UWImfFax8Ew&list=PL8dPuuaLjXtPNZwz5_o_5uirJ8gQXnhEO&index=24