Low morale on high population planets

I had a thought.
Do planets have population limits or does the population just keep growing ad infinitum?

Population limits that tie into the class and size of planet and perhaps the types of improvements built may be a way around the morale issue.

Shades of MOO.

Population will grow until a certain point based on the planet class.

But low morale will slow or stop population growth.

Morale is the main limit. Exceptionally low morale will stop populations growth.

Planets do, as Brad just mentioned, have a maximum limit, but with high class planets, it's usually difficult to keep morale high enough to reach that point. (For reference, I've had a class 31 with a population of roughly 45 billion in beta 1D, and morale was what limited the population there.)

Hmmm, morale is a lot easier to keep up now in the latest releases, but I wonder if too much population starting out is the problem I've been having with starting new colonies later in the game on second and third planets in a system. That is, if I am starting from a planet with 20-30 billion, I'll go ahead and take 2 or 3 or 4 billion to colonize those 13-17 class planet in the same system. It always starts out as 1%, takes forever to budge from that and almost never reaches 100%.

So from your invasion experience, it sounds like that 2 or 3 billion starting pop. is where I am making my mistake. A guide to optimum "seed" populations for different classes of planets would be nice. On the other hand, it's figuring these kind of things out that makes the game fun.

Jotun,

I don't think there is an optimum "seed" population. I think the "starting pop" is something you have to develop for yourself. It varies with your government type, the class of planet, and your strategy. But you could start playing with 100M for now and develop your seed sizes from there.

I forgot to mention that the clue for a starting size comes in the number of colonists in the colony ship you are given at the start of the game, the "USS Discovery" with 100M colonists.

Yeah, I just wasn't sure if it should be the same rough percentage or always 100M. They like it so much when you take more!

Jotun,

I have found that 100M doesn't work in some cases. First, it is not always possible to get exactly 100M. Second, there are cases where I try to use 200M (if conditions allow) and cases where I use 80M, 70M, or even less. The key is not what work best, but what works for YOU. You have to play with it until you find your own optimals.

OK. I think I see something that is causing all of the questions and complaints here. I have a couple of planets that have grown such that their morale has dropped below 30%. As I understand it, population growth is supposed to stop when morale drops below 40%.

Is there something about the population growth enhancement projects that messes up the 40% morale limit?

As far as I can tell, 40% was never the limit. I've had Earth down to 23% before even building a morale or pop. growth improvement (had it building Trade Goods that I managed to get to very early in the game).

The calculation for growth of a planet used to be based on no growth for anything less than 40% morale. It was that way in the alpha. This was all before the code that supports the techs that improve population growth, such as Basic Environment Control, was implemented and I believe at some time during the Alpha Brad had said that population growth would ALWAYS stop at 40%. He may have changed his mind on this but I for one have not heard him say so.

Also, the OS/2 version was eventually set so that population growth quit once the morale got below 41%. The OS/2 version also had suffered a bad problem with out of control population growth and rebellions. That is the reason the 40% limit was established in the OS/2 version. I had been under the impression that the same limit would be in this version. Without this limit this game will have some serious playability issues.

I have yet to complete this study, but I may have some figures that may lead to some understanding of the problem.

I have been monitoring the populations of 8 planets with populations above 10B, one with a population above 60B. Unfortunately the one with 60B has reached its max population (a class 31 planet) and remains at that population with a morale of 100%, and the other planets do not exceed 25B and their morale does not drop below 31%.

The rest of the planets are one class 31, one class 30, one class 28, three class 24, and one class 22. These planets have a mixture of morale boosting social projects completed and, of course, I have researched a lot of morale boosting techs and have completed all of the morale boosting trade goods.

However, I may be seeing something that may explain what is being complained about in this thread. When I build a transport at a planet with 26B people and load 4B troops aboard it the morale jumps from 31% 80%. Then in three turns the population increases back to 26B morale drops back down to 32%. The decline in morale of 48% over only three turns seems quite steep. I am now building a morale improvement social project to try to observe this affect with a larger population.

The morale improvements seem to adjust thhe base morale, which on a planet with a high max population, like a class 31, could cause these high swings if the current population is very high but not yet at max.

The morale still drops in the same amount relative to the population increase that it would without the improvements, they only affect the final morale, not its delta.

If you want to test this in an extreme ssituation, you could always create more terraforming improvements to build on that class 31. I've been considering doing this myself to poke at something else (morale, population, and planet class boundschecking, to be specific).

Is anyone still having this problem on build B2B? Or are the SD people sitting there laughing behind their hands at me? "Yea. We made Jack go on another wild goose chase. We already fixed it."

So far on this game I started on the latest build I have been unable to get a planet with a huge population to get into the dumps morale wize (anything below 30%). I have one planet with 139B and a few with 30B+.

Cheers,

Well, I didn't do anything to the morale code.

Well, Cari, you are right. It is not fixed. I now have two planets with morale at 29%, one with 32 Billion inhabitants, the other with 36B. The first is a class 30 and the second is a class 31. I will play around with it some to see if I can get a pattern.

I am honestly begining to think the problem is something other than morale or growth causing this, but I am unable to disern what it might be. If you can think of anything that might do it, and do it only to a few planets without affecting the entire lot of them, please tell me.

I had six planets tank on me, one to 9% and the rest to 1%. One of those that went to 1% had a population of only 4000M. After building transports to offload the excess population these planets settled down and they have been behaving ever since. But others have been doing it one or two a turn every 10-20 turns.

I now have a specific case I can document and will send it in with the saved games to Cari.

I had a class 39 planet at a population of 82319 million and a morale of 59% grow in one turn to 87522 million (6.3%) and the morale plummeted to 19% (a drop of 33%).

That sounds excactly like what I had suggested a few posts back in this thread.

Higher population means higher pop. growth when morale allows.

Morale changes according to increasing population by a fixed scale affected only by planet class.

Morale improvements only increase the final morale, not it's rate of change.

If things are as Arturus Magi suggests and as Lucky Jack's research seems to indicate then I think things should change.

If things are as they seem then there doesn't seem to be much point in building morale improvements until your planet reaches max. population. The hitch is that max. population is restricted by morale. Sigh.

Magus,

The word we have been given continually is that each planet class has a maximum population it can ever achieve. The other llimit, the one you mentioned, is that a planet with 40% or less morale will not grow. In my current game, I have a few planets at the maximum population for their class now, a class 44 with 155 Billion at 100% for one. While morale does limit population it does not set the maximum population. It only restrains growth until you build a morale improving social project or research a morale improving tech.

BTW, part of my strategy is to build morale improving social projects only when the morale of a planet gets below some point. Sometimes I use 70%, sometimes I use 60%. I have yet to settle on a value as yet as the optimum seems to change with each build, perhaps because of tweeks to balancing or new features.

Don't forget how closely your income is tied to population, and how a planet's production drops when morale goes down. (Have you noticed that you can actually improve production of a planet with a population of about 8 Billion by a shield or two by loading a transport with about a quarter of the planet's population? The morale goes up, they work better, things get done quicker, ...)

I have noticed the value of deporting some of the planetary inhabitants. LOL

From my viewpoint the main problem is that things seem to behave in an inconsistent fashion at times. I have some planets that seem to chug along at 100% morale for pretty much the entire game while others are persistent in having morale problems.

Magus,

The research I did into this problem involved very careful monitoring of the growth and morale of the planets in my game. The game behaved according to the current rules. The problem is that the current rules does not take into consideration what the effect has on high class planets with populations above about 30 or 40 Billion.