What is the effect of population size?

[markgame]

I know that this might be a obvious question to some, but I am having trouble finding an answer...

What is the effect of population size in the game? For instance, if I have a planet with only 10m people out of a max population of 200m, what is the effect? I seem to still be able to build the maximum number of facilities. Is there some other effect?

[SirDarwin]

I believe you recieve a bonus when your population is 4000M+, so it really only effect large planets. Also it gives you a higher score I think

I'd like to see your ships manned with people, I mean a Starbase would need a really large population to run it effectivly

[Cyrien]

More people = build faster.

That's about it. But I could be missing something.

[markgame]

I found the answer in the HTML manual, to quote "The population of the planet operates the facilities and their happiness and size modifies the production of the facilities." So I woould expect that a population of 20m on a planet with a max population of 200m will be able to produce only 10% of the possible maximum resource output.

[LintMan]

> "So I woould expect that a population of 20m on a planet with a max population of 200m will be able to produce only 10% of the possible maximum resource output"

I don't know what the numbers really are, but I'm certain it's nowhere near that dramatic an impact. For example, my fully loaded homeworld with 4.8 billion can make a colony ship in 3 turns, while a small colony with only 30 million might take 5 turns to make the ship.

You can see a the production rate for a planet or base ship yard by looking at the top of the production queue window.

[Instar]

Hey guys, check the abilities tab on your planet description! The very left most one!
You should find stuff about everything there

[markgame]

Thanks Instar, that appears to be it. Once you reach a certain value the production rate steps up a certain percent.

Any other effects anyone knows of?

[wr8th]

Bump up.

While rumaging through the text files in the game, I thought I saw a delimiter showing minimum amount of population needed to run a facility (set at 50). Is this the way it's supposed to work?
It seems unrealistic that on two planets where one has a population 10x greater produces something less than twice as fast as the smaller one. Can anyone elaborate? Thanks.

[Dracus]

You can set the amount of pop it takes to run a single fac. If the total number of the planet pop drops below that number then the fac will not produce (In theory).
The actual production is based on a number of factors, the grade of the fac, the amount of that resource, and a couple others I think.
I think a fac will also produce less if the pop is angry then of they are happy. (not sure about this one, but if not then it should, as angry people do not like to work as hard as happy ones).

[ 20 March 2002: Message edited by: Dracus ]

[Suicide Junkie]

In P&N v2.5-PBW, I have edited settings.txt to improve the population effects.

My settings.txt file is the better part of a megabyte in size, and provides three thousand pop modifiers (vs the 12 defaults).

Spaceyard rate, for example, starts at 10%.
There is a +1% increase for each 25M people you add to the planet.
2 Billion people therefore get 90% of standard Sy build rate, and a maxxed out sphereworld gets 25.7 times the normal build rate.

===============

Re: unmodded pop modifiers.

it goes something like:
+5% for 100M
+10% for 500M
+20% for 1B
+30% for 2B
+40% for 3B
+50% for 4B
+60% for 5B
+70% for 6B
+80% for 7B
+90% for 8B
+100% for 10B

[ 20 March 2002: Message edited by: Suicide Junkie ]