How to deal with overpopulation

[Adyne]

Thats my problem, I don't know.

Ok here's the short version: all my people are leaving my systems because of overpopulation.
But so many people have already left that I have now too little people and my banks are running dry and it gets worse, because the -30 happiness due overpopulation doesn't go away, even when I have only one per planet.

I still have other hapiness problems, but if you can help me out here, that would be great.

[LezDole]

Hmm, it should go away. Check your systems and see which are overcrowded. Manipulate populations between planets, and send populations that are in "overpopulation" slots to another planets that are not filled yet. I dont recall being too big of an issue generaly.

[The Grand Mugwump]

Are you sure the -30 is from overpopulation then? It might be you're controlling more systems than you can handle, which provides a constant hit to all systems' happiness.

[LezDole]

Check if you are in negative because of "overcolonisation", not "overpopulation", those are 2 completely different things.

[strike478]

Originally posted by Python:

Thats my problem, I don't know.

Ok here's the short version: all my people are leaving my systems because of overpopulation.
But so many people have already left that I have now too little people and my banks are running dry and it gets worse, because the -30 happiness due overpopulation doesn't go away, even when I have only one per planet.

I still have other hapiness problems, but if you can help me out here, that would be great.

Building that increase happiness, laws, governors, manually moving pops from overpopulated systems to nearby, halfempty colonies.

[Adyne]

Maybe its overcolonisation, how do I solve it?

[csatrad]

Technological advancement that you can build up. There are also powerfull heroes in congress that can boost happines and or reduce the negative impact on overcolonization. There are some heroes that have other great bonuses to happines place them on the most population allowance systems and dump any excess population there. You need system improvements (right side of techtree) to allow population movements.

But in complete reality if you cannot affor that many colony then just simply abadone some that is not benifical until you settle down to the best ones even if they are quite far apart.

[Red Star, Blood Moon]

Originally posted by Python:

Maybe its overcolonisation, how do I solve it?

As others have said, laws, heroes, improvements etc. There are a few techs that increase your colonization limit. Each system is -10 over that limit. Various heroes have abilities that give approval. As I've said elsewhere my current game I'm floating -120 disapproval from overcolonization alone and all of my systems are between content and ecstatic.

Use the left quadrant of the tech tree, the pink techs mainly. In addition to increasing colonization limits there's tons of improvements there that will give you boosts to approval on a system by system basis. For a decent amount of time I was also relying on those random events that give you +10 or +20 approval options for 15 turns which can help you build approval improvements and stabilize in the meantime. You're only in the hole -30 so just two of those improvements will fix it especially if you up your limit.

The other big thing is laws. Keep an eye on which improvements and tech researches influence which political parties. There's a Militarist party faction law that gives you +20 approval for each homeworld owned, iirc empire wide and for yours and each occupied enemy homeworld. The Pacifist faction gives you a law with +20 per each allied faction and +10 for each faction you're at peace with. In a medium size game with 6 players that's +40 for having two allies (max allies is half the number of players) and an additional +10 or +20 if you can somehow manage to keep the peace with all but one of them. There's I think a couple other parties with approval boosting laws but I forget which ones.

The only difficult thing there is making absolutely sure that faction doesn't lose power in an election, which you can enforce in more hamfisted manner through dicatorship or federation or republic influencing, or in a democracy even (which gives you +5 approval for having that government btw) just making sure that you're building and researching enough tech and hiring/assigning enough heroes and boosting pops etc that support your party. Just don't let that faction lose power because then you immediately lose access to their laws.