Population Growth Issues

Do you have any bonuses from racial traits?

Do you know you get a +25% bonus for having morale >75% and a +100% bonus for having it =100%?

Why then, after 1 year of gameplay, with no population growth traits or modifiers is my civilization population 225 billion people? A full 7 times the expected size?

WITHOUT modifiers? THat's Kerazy?! Never played Beta so I don't have any experience with it.

Do you have any bonuses from racial traits? Do you know you get a +25% bonus for having morale >75% and a +100% bonus for having it =100%?

He said no bonuses, but its not clear he factored in his morale.

My latest games have been with +70% growth rate, and I keep my morale up at 100% until I'm done building colony ships on my home world (depends a bit on how many planets I can grab...).

I've been finding that using this method while researching +morale techs and occasionally sticking down a +morale building has allowed me to zoom my economy to the point where I don't even need trade to run 100% spending and still have a surpluss of anywhere from 100-500BC (depending on how many planets, and how much industry I build). Of course when you add in trade it can zoom to over 1000BC per turn, which essentially lets me run insane research and just buy my military/buildings.

Its too bad the AI doesn't seem to play the same games with their pop growth.

Ya but by the sounds of it your max pop isnt that high.
Which in the long run will make more money.
Also its needed for defence of a planet and making troop transports. I have succesfully replled 2 waves of troop transports with 1base that had a crap load of people on it.

In a recent game my population at the end of the game was over 1 Trillion people and generating 22,000 bc per turn.

u say u had a civ pop of 225B in one year? that cant be right...i dont hit 100B till mid-late game which i guess is roughly 3-5 years,wut concerns me about pop growth is the fact that only the comp torians seem to have a workign bonus, the thalans always have same pop as everyone adn when i play as thalan or torian i have the same pop or lower than everyoen else also even if i have the most planets or close to,but then the comp torian has dbl the pop no matter wut the game situation is...sumthin seems off about the pop growth buisness but i got no clue lol, ppl with thoughts come and share them

P.S - I never play with more than "uncommon" for habitable planets.

Torians have a 25% morale-bonus in addition to their population growth-bonus so that's probably why their population is so much larger than the Thalans. It's very possible that they have a lot of planets with 100% morale in the beginning, effectively doubling their growth rate.

My population just hit 500 billion and I'm just stating 2227. No racial modifiers, and I just built the aphrodisiac achievement. I think I may have gotten a couple +1% bonuses from exploring anomalies as my pop growth number reads 53%, including 50% for the aphrodisiac.

It just doesn;t feel right. And my taxes are crap. I make approximately 2500 per turn and spend all of it. Am upgrading to banks on most planets, but my taxation is crappy.

I try and keep morale at above 85%. How much of an impact does morale have on pop growth?

So far in the beta, I have been keeping a very low tax (~22-26%) and building early entertainment centers where it is needed so that I have 100% morale on all planets. I usually buy an entertainment center on my homeplanet the first turn. After some time, I have had more than double the population of everyone else except the Torians.

How much of an impact does morale have on pop growth?

Huge.
>75% morale gives you a 25% pop.growth bonus.
A 100% morale gives a 100% pop.growth bonus

Alright, I did a bit of spreadsheet math here. (What can I say, I'm lazy) Without bonuses above and beyond what I'd expect out of having high moral, (+100% or +25%) I can't figure out how the population got so high so quickly.

Here's what we'd expect:
On normal moral, we have fCurrentPop = fLastWeekPop * 1.03;
On high moral (+100%), we have fCurrentPop = fLastWeekPop * (1.03 + (0.03 * 1.00) ); //effectively, pop growth = 1.06, double normal rate
On good moral, (+25%), we have fCurrentPop = fLastWeekPop * (1.03 + (0.03 * 0.25) ); //rounded to the hundredths place, this is pop growth = 1.04, or staying at true floating point, it's 1.0375

My spreadsheet, however, says that in order for growth the get past 225 from 5, we need a growth rate of 1.08 for the majority of the time... For an entire year at that growth rate, we get 273,530Million... If we take week 49's population of 201B, and reduce that down to the normal 1.03 growth, then we'll get 226.226B, much closer to your actual results.

So, if there are absolutely no bonuses, other than moral, then you're doing the impossible, and have likely found a bug.

Here's what the code should look like...
fCurrentPop = fLastWeekPop * (1.03 + (0.03 * fMoralBonus) + (0.03 * fOtherBonus) );
Of course, I don't like hard coding constants, 'cause there are modders out there that like to tweak settings. Instead, I'd choose to read the base growth rate from a file.

That would give me the following code:
fCurrentPop = fLastWeekPop * (1+ fPopRate + (fPopRate * fMoralBonus) + (fPopRate * fOtherBonus) );

Now, even with keeping in mind the bug that I suspect, I still started writing the bug in...

Here's what I think the bug is...
fCurrentPop = fLastWeekPop * (1.03 + (1.03 * fMoralBonus) + (1.03 * fOtherBonus) );
Instead of multiplying the bonus by 0.03, the bonus is multiplied by 1.03... giving us a total bonus of 2.06 on 100% moral, and a bonus of 1.355 on 75%+ moral.

Since a planet's population affects the moral, we'll probably see one week of 100% moral, followed by a couple of weeks of 75%+ moral before the planet gets too full to get the astronomical bonuses. Imagine every single taxpayer, male or female, having a kid, plus an extra 6% of the people coming out of the woodwork to pay taxes, each week that there is 100% moral. Every week, there'd also be a little more than a third of the population having a kid each week. That's one short gestation period.

Now, since I don't have 1.1B yet, I can't verify this bug myself... but here's how you can verify it.

Look at the population each week... If it doubles, then slows down to what would then be expected levels, then the code has an extra 1 where there should be a 0.

Note that there is only one person that has seen the bug so far (that I know of).

I did a quick test. Began a new game, kept my morale below 75% and just hit the turn button.
turn 1: 5.0B
turn 2: 5.075B
turn 3: 5.15B
turn 4: 5.225B
This equals approximatly to a 1.5%-increase. I had 8.7 billion people on my homeplanet after one full year.

Same test but with 100% morale.
turn 1: 5B
turn 2: 5.15B
turn 3: 5.30B
turn 4: 5.450B
As you can see, I got roughly a 3% population-increase with 100% morale.
Which means that it's actually lower than what's written in the beta-notes. 1.5% is the normal growth, not 3%.