Population Purpose?

they increase facilities "base production" by percentage. It eventually doublles after 8000M IIRC.

One of my biggest complaints about the stock game design is that population is too unimportant. Although an extremely high population can increase production by a modest amount, that's still a poor incentive to protect population centers.

Two colonies with 1M population each will collectively outproduce a homeworld of 4 billion people.

Furthermore, even the increased production value of population can be had by other means. Improved ship yards, for example, can give the same kind of production benefits. Basically, as long as you have at least 1M people per colony, there's little benefit to protecting or growing more population.

All of the above, of course, assumes that you're playing a last-man-standing game. Population does have an impact on your score; however, most games ignore scores in favor of other victory conditions (i.e. nobody else is left to oppose you).

Other 4x games typically make population an extremely import resource. Large populations either produce more taxes (which SEV does not have), or more directly influence production. Commonly, games are designed so that each facility / structure requires a minimum number of colonists to run it.

I agree 100%. I think the min # to operate a faxility neads to increase to 100M; this way population is important. Great idea

can a facility increase the max number of poulation allowed on a planet?

Actually, IIRC, population goes towards your game score
Which in turn affects diplomacy
Also, it affects how fast your colonies can build facs & ships/units

In BM, a bonus of 50% to production and construction rates for a full 4 Billion populatated world is not that negligible IMHO.

Sort of...the Atmosphere Converters will dramatically improve living space. Other than that, I know of no building that increases population maximums on a planet.

thanks but i was more thinking along the lines of
a residential center or even city; i know they dont exist in stock i wonder if it is possible to mod a facility which increases pop max, though honstly i doubt it because of the planet sizes, which would mess it up anyway...

yes, population has an impact but not so much as to make me bother move ppl around. If you divide the popCap with the available build slots (facilities) it could be done that each slot would be activated only if there was pop available.

To put it simple: Slots available for facilities would become available only when enough population is on the planet with the exception of system wide facilities like the spaceport. So if you want just an outpost or resupply depot nothing changes, but for a production or resource center you'd have to act wise.

I cannot say if this would be balanced though... and there's the problem with re-scripting the AI which is a poor manager already.

I have always thought population was pretty much an afterthought in Space Empires... Civilisations and Galactic Civilisations give population the importance it should have... so why not SEV??