What is the effect of population on production?

from Stardock Forums
I was wondering about this, and I can't figure out how important population is to figuring how productive a planet actually is.

Does anyone have some rough formula or thumb-rule for figuring out whether or not it would be a good idea just to take away population in transports or colony ships instead of leaving them on a planet and building morale improvements to try to keep them appeased?


I'll be playing around with it in my game today, so I'll report back my own opinions.
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Reply #1 from Stardock Forums Top
Plutarck,

The algorithm between planet class, population, morale, and production that Brad built for GC/OS2 and has brought over to GC/WIN is very clever. It is quite complex and circular, but SE seems to find it very easy to adjust. It seems to be table driven and the tables have been changed many times by SD during the Alpha and Beta. But the basics are: production increases with higher planet class, higher population, higher and morale. However, as population increases, morale decreases, which will also decrease production and population growth. Some other things they have done with it is to limit planet population by class, limit population growth to morale over 50%, reduce population for any morale levels below 40%, provide growth rate enhancements (love mushrooms, space junk, social projects, etc.), morale boosters (galaxy resources, space junk, social projects, trade goods, etc.), and so on.

With all of the things in the game that can affect growth rate, morale, and production, I have long since quit trying to calculate my own tables for the rate of these changes. On GC/OS2 there was a problem with morale, in that it was almost impossible to control, so using transports to balance populations between planets was common, and loading up transports and "nuking" them was a desparate tactic often used. While I would like to see something for population balancing in GC/Win, I have not found any need to offload and destroy population. Building the morale projects, the space junk, and the galaxy resources seem to be working well for me.