There have been some suggestions on how to deal with the overpopulation issue in the game. Overpopulation is a problem because once a planet goes beyond a certain population point, it starts having morale problems. Major morale problems. I'm sure this was meant to be a penalty aspect of the game that you're to work into your game strategy. However, it goes way too far. Quickly no matter what you do, the morale on your planets plummets. You can have all the morale bonuses, propaganda machines, etc. and it will still plummet. I would imagine the planet would eventually becomes like the world in the original Star Trek episode "The Mark of Gideon".

The only way I've found and I hear others have found to take care of this is simply toss a fourth of the population on a colony ship. Unfortunately, now the problem becomes what do you do with that colony ship once all the planets are colonized? What I do is simply have them go from one side of the map to the other. Forever in transit. It is kind of humorous after a while. This massive convoy of colony ships going between the same two points forever. A friend says he just destroys the ship once it has left orbit. He says this has its humorous side as well. You've just tossed a billion people on a colony ship, there are no known planets to colonize, and you explode the ship right there next to the planet. What then happens? Morale improves on that planet. That's not the humorous part. The humorous part is... You soon need to do this again AND there's people on that planet that will get on the next "colony" ship. LOL

However, neither of these solutions is a good one. Both increase the micro-managing you need to do of the game and creates a surreal world of either billions upon billions of eternally homeless people or horrific mass slaughter.

Possible solutions to correct this issue could be:

A) Population cap on each planet. This is along the lines of what was done in MOO2. A planet only holds so many and once that is reached, population stops growing at that time. This is the simplest solution. Then when you build a colony ship from that planet and take a portion of its population off, reproduction starts back up on that planet until it hits its max again. Or if you improve the planet to enable it to hold more people, reproduction starts up again until the max is once again reached.

The China Solution. Your government forces only one child per couple. I would have this option be only available to neutral and evil empires.

C) Forced sterilization. I would think this would be an option that could only be available to evil empires. The empire sterilizing all criminals and, just like unwanted puppies at the dog pound, orphans. The more overpopulation becomes a problem, the lesser the crime that warrants sterilization as part of its punishment. This option could actually help improve morale since only law-abiding citizens are reproducing and they're passing along their subservient mindset to their children.

D) The Great Migration. This could be an option for good, neutral, and evil empires. You create a special colony ship that puts all its colonists in cryogenic stasis then send them off the map to "parts unknown". Now it wouldn't need to be a special ship but simply an option you could pick when double clicking on the colony ship. The ship then flies off at its normal speed in a random direction until it goes off the map. The biggest negative of having it be simply a double-click option is that this still requires a lot of micro-managing. The benefit of having a special cryogenic colony ship is that it could be something that you could automate. When overpopulation occurs on planet and there's no more planets to colonize, the game makes your next ship from that planet a cryogenic colony ship to take off the overpopulation and then automatically flies it off the map.

D) How developed a planet is determines its population growth and even decrease. When a planet has few high-tech buildings (i.e., research labs), it has a high rate of population increase. As it adds high-tech buildings, population growth slows. It eventually stabilizes. Add more high-tech buildings and it even starts to decline. You then have a problem of underpopulation. This is more reality based as underpopulation is a problem with all industrialized countries in the world today. The only reason these countries increase in population is because of the influx of immigrants. If this population increase/decrease system were implemented, I'd allow population to move amongst your planets. You allow population movement (behind-the-scenes to reduce micro-managing) and you then would need to have some underdeveloped planets cranking out people to shore up the populations of the population-decreasing highly developed planets.

This last option I like the best. It makes sense and is based in reality. It still gives you a problem you need to deal with, but not one that so cripples you as the current overpopulation problem does.

So which of the above do you like best? And do you have another suggestion to add to the list?