Population Growth Question

I had a question regarding population growth. I was under the assumption that I had a pretty good grasp on how it works, but something had happened in the game I am playing now that I thought was odd. During the initial colonization phase, the first planet I colonised was a Class 12. It was the best one I could find. Other planets I colonised later were a Class 6, and the Class 4 that starts in your home system.

Throughout the growth of these planets, I found it odd that both the Class 4 and Class 6 were growing in population faster than the Class 12 planet, since they are of lower qualities, they both had lower approval rating, and they were both colonised after the Class 12. By the time the Class 6 had filled up to 6 billion, the Class 12 was between 4 and 5 billion. The Class 4 and 6 also never got morale buildings, they are both specialised to research, where the Class 12 did get morale buildings.

The only thing I can think of is maybe distance from the capital affects it? The Class 12 was way outside of my main influence area and was close to other civs planets, but it still maintained its own bubble of influence, and later flipped another civs planet in the same system, with the support of an influence starbase, and I built the Restaurant of Eternity or whatever its called on the Class 12 planet.

Its a moot point now because I am far enough in the game where most of my currently controlled planets are at max pop, but was curious if anyone had any insight as to why the Class 12 would have grown slower? There has to be something I was overlooking.

I am playing Dark Avatar, with a fresh gold edition install, no updates, can't get internet access for my laptop where I'm at at this time, but have EU coming to me in the mail.

Thank you for reading.

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That's odd.

There are a few things that might be contributing.

Taking a wild guess, I would say you forgot to fill up your initial colony ship to its limit of 250 (500 if you're playing somewhere earlier than 1.7.something) colonists by landing it on your home planet before sending it out to colonize. With no population growth bonuses, and being somewhere between 41% and 99% approval (therefore not getting the 2x growth bonus at 100%, but perhaps getting the 1.25x bonus at 75%), it would take anywhere from 15 to 30 turns (rough numbers, the spored growth added to populations that don't achieve capped base growth in DA is difficult to predict exactly) simply for the colony to reach 250M pop, from the 100M that are in the initial colony ship.

If you're playing a version of DA with a 500M population colony module, the difference is even more noticeable.

The second thing, and less likely, is that you've gotten colonization events on one or more planets, and that the planets that you're seeing grow faster you chose the evil choice which granted you additional population growth, and for the one that is growing slower you chose good for less population growth. But there are only 2 or 3 of these events, if that many, and it would be very strange to find them on all three subject planets, as there are a good ~30ish other colonization events. Further, a colonization event only seems to happen between 25% and 40% of the time.

Just as a note-distance from your homeworld does not affect it, at all.

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I think you nailed it, I did colonize the Class 12 planet with the initial colony ship, and I did not fill it, I didnt even know it didnt start with max pop on it. I've never re filled the initial colony ship in my games before. Now it makes sense, thank you for that, and now I've learned something new.

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