Do you manually move population to low-pop worlds?

Yes. I do it all the time.

I play mostly on Medium maps. I do it because i want to get my new worlds paying quickly - pop equals credits.

Why have a planet of 12 billion full, not making use of it's ability to use the Malthusian rules fully ..and a newly conquered PQ 6 world with 120 million that will take years to grow to full size...the 12 billion pop world will replenish itself in weeks or months - with emigration now I have 18 Billion taxpayers in a short time frame. I make use of the 12 billion pop world's ability to regrow populationj quickly.

I have played only Small and Medium maps so far, 1.6 Betas 1 and 2.

If I'm fortunate enough to get another planet within two squares of my homeworld, I will always take the opportunity to move lots of population to it because it takes zero ship movement! (Just manipulate the launch direction of your colony ships.) But otherwise I haven't really done it in the early game. I just installed 1.6 Beta 3 yesterday, and that may change things since Colony modules have changed significantly. (Incidentally, if I want to briefly revert to Beta 2 to screw around with old metaverse saved games, is there any way to do that?)

During the conquest phase, however, I make an effort to bring newly conquered worlds up to at least 2B population ASAP; since I'm constantly building new transports, this isn't hard to arrange.

Oh yeah. You can ferry 6B population to all the class-1 worlds and they'll actually make you money.

I've got more interesting things to do in my games than stuff around moving population.

If i'm going to bother putting people on a transport, then the next stop i make will be an enemy planet.

edit... i forgot that in DL i will sometimes move population to planets i claimed using an upgraded to colony ship cargo hull. Upgrading cargo hulls to colony ships i hear has been nerfed in DA.

@DoJ

If you have auto-archive checked when you use SDC to update the game - then you can revert to the older versions using SDC. I beleive it is under the File Menu on the top left corner.

May not be really quick - but it is easy. Just make sure to auto archive the newest update so you can revert back to it.

Bad thing is the archives are rather large and can really eat up HDD space - take that into consideration.

Hey GW! Where have you been? I play on medium to gigantic, preferring gigantic of course and at one time I did use the 'emigration' technique to build up a planet's pop, especially if it was on the edge of my territory/influence borders. It really does wonders for the planet growth as can be expected. Lately however I have pretty much stopped this practice and go more with what Mystikmind said and just ferry 'troops' for invasions vs. building up a planet. Doesn't mean I won't do it in a pinch if necessary, but for the most part I've just been blowing everyone to smithereens.

Sometimes I will build special Transport (or Colony) ships I rename as "Shuttle" (to keep from accidentally expending them.)

I stuff a bunch of engines on them; they cost more, but they're re-usable. Remember, you don't have to dump all the crew on one planet, so go ahead and put extra Transport modules on to increase efficiency and limit micro-management at the same time. I build the cheap, expendable no-engine "assault" Transports (or Colony founders) out on the border planets.

The rule of thumb I use is to try to get a "seed" population of up to 2.5 billion people on my new worlds as quick as possible. This maximizes population growth, keeps your economy going, increases Influence on your border, and may even help insulate against a surprise re-invasion.

The big hassle for me is auto-switching to the next ship after the Shuttle goes into orbit. Sometimes it's a pain to have to go back and find the planet again so I can re-launch. I wish there could be an option to make the auto-switch not cycle after a ship enters orbit. But I guess that would be asking for a bit much.

I play on gigantic and I do it occasionally dependent on the colonization strategy that I'm using. I've never bothered with it on conquered worlds because by that time in the game getting a single planet profitable is really not all that important.

I use at least two different colonization strategies, more if you include variations on a theme. But basically, I'll go with a maxed out grab for as many planets as I can get as fast as I can get them or I'll go for much slower colony rush taking only prime PQ planets and building them into strong planets as quickly as I can (quality over quantity). There are pros and cons for each method and I'd recommend that folks try both sooner or later. I think more recently I'm slightly more in favor of the quality over quantity method.

In this case I do often bus pop from my home planet to recently colonized worlds instead of being in a mad rush to get another new planet. Of course when you do this you don't lose the colony ship and so you can still go back to your home planet, get more pop and then finally colonize a new planet. However, this can take significant amounts of time to do. The most I've done for any one planet is another 1 to 2 loads of colonists however this was when the colony module could carry 500 colonists.

If you use this method I think it pays to make engine speed an early research priority, this is not something you want to do at 3 or 4 parsecs a turn.

Part of the problem with ferrying colonists in DA is that speeds have been nerfed so much. YOu have a very hard time building a colony ship/transport fast enough to make it worthwhile until late in the game when I find that you don't really need to move pop anymore.

Yesterday i was using this technique to populate 4 planets that we're all in range of each other. I would move 3~4b colonists from the home planet to planet 2, then from planet2 to planet 3, until i had the colonists on the last planet. At 250 million per module with only one module, i assure you it wasn't fun.

What i really wonder about is, does the AI use this technique as well?

Thanks for the replies, folks. I guess this question is really just a different way of getting the answer: It's the economy, stupid. But apparently I'm not the only one who occasionally figures click overhead into my cost-benefit thinking

Seriously, though, I can tell I should at least give this occasional consideration, and probably build dedicated Shuttles if I make a habit of forcibly relocating populations. (There's another place where the game could enjoy lots of detailing--Humans should hate being driven onto transports, Yor wouldn't care, Thalans might thank you.)

@ Evil S: I wish I could say I've been terribly busy IRL, but I've been light on GC2 (playing & posting) b/c I got really peeved over an unresolvable Metaverse muddle (19k I can't post, darnit!) and, on the up side, my paid work got busier of late and I'm trying to make as much of my PC time billable as I can.

What's the maximum population growth in DL and DA?

Are you refering to some thing like the non-cycle of ships toggle that is in the options menu?

I keep a small fleet of space liners with 2-3 colony modules around to beef up population after I spore enemy worlds. It helps the economy and also makes the planets harder to retake. By the time I control > 2/3 of the galaxy, though, my economy is normally on enough of a roll that I don't need to repopulate, and the threat of reinvasion is much smaller than the click hassle factor. I just start building fertility clinics and forget the transports after that.



Spore. When you absolutely, positively got to kill every motherfrakker in the galaxy. Accept no substitutes.

i frequently use troop transports to do this.

i'll use 2-3 production planets to pump out the xports, launch them with 1 dude, then each planet has a rotation of 3-4 other planets which the xports pick the troops up from.

from there they'll either ferry them to a border colony for a pop boost and return to pick up more, or they'll slink away to a shadow of the galaxy to await further orders....

in the meantime, the planets that feed the xports are usually at 100% approval and grow very quickly.

I don't use transports for this, no. Anyways, they're happier when they have less people on them. I need to give them time to build a few morale improvements before I require that they have people to give me money, and by the time their morale is at ~100% they've already reproduced enough on their own.

I never considered this. I may make a special colony ship for just this purpose early in a game.

You could drop 1000-2000 troops on the planet and let them knock up all the colonists daughters.
  

Supposedly your tax income is proportional to the square root of the population on a planet. If so, maximum income can be achieved by evenly distributing your people to as many planets as possible.

With that in mind, what would be the best population-to-farm/entertainment structures, assuming that's all you built?

So let's say that population is 600M. The income would be ~24bc right? What's the maintenance on a basic colony vs. a farm vs. an basic entertainment?

Right after I started this thread, I had a good stretch where it was really useful to run a colony ship between existing colonies for quite a while. I don't do hard numbers obssession, but I understand that colonies over 2 billion grow much faster than ones under 1 billion, and people=money in this game.

But oddly enough, I've hit a similar game calendar time in a few games since then and the combo of my tech level & map specifics have not made it worthwhile to do the Interplanetery Wagon Trail thing.



If you're asking about templates for cash-cow planets, folks like Mumblefratz and Iztok Bitenc might have some interesting replies. I don't like to overspecialize until the very late game, but I also like as many worlds as possible to pay well. For class 10 and up, I build one farm and two entertainment tiles. Sometimes I need a third entertainment tile for a while on some worlds, but I try to remember to go convert them to markets or something else after my morale tech is high enough.

Edit: This was mis posted somehow.