I think somewhere they said like on earch say at the beginning of the game there is still a USA, China, Britian, etc... So at every new term people leave those countries to join your empire and possibly other empires to register with your empire. But ya it is kinda unrealistic how the population just explodes. But seriously every turn I WANT MORE BABIES AND TAX THEM! It would be pretty hard to work something out that is realistic though.

That's the explanation given, but it fails to account for new colonies.  If I land 250M colonists on a planet, eventually I'll have enough that they'll be growing at 150M/turn (with approval at 100%).  This is 5,850M pop in a 39 week timespan (9 months, even though it's generally slightly closer to 8), from a base of 1,875M with 4% growth, or 2,500M with 3% growth.  This basically means each and every couple is having sextuplets, or in the latter case, somewhere in between quadruplets and quintuplets.

And then there's the fact that the Torian super ability is called Super Breeder.

I'm not sure I understand if the idea is that I'm transporting all of those people over there why they're not paying taxes when they get there, nor how I have that much population to send from my home planet, regardless of whether or not they're paying taxes.  On a large map, with abundant planets, this theory leads us to the conclusion that I start out with 1-2 trillion pop on my home planet, but for some reason only 8B, or 0.4-0.8%, is actually paying any taxes.

While I would agree that it would be nice if this were more realistic, it's not something that overly concerns me, even as much of a perfectionist as I am.

There's also that whole issue about unhappiness as population rises... why would more taxpayers make people unhappy (presumably due to overcrowding)... seems to me I'd be happier if my neighbour's were paying tax too!

Transports capable of carrying a quarter of a billion colonists aren't unrealistic.  Unless of course you expect them to be luxury craft with cabins for everyone.  It's much better to freeze the meatbags at the start of the journey, stack the cryogenic pods on massive racks in the cargo hold, and then when you make landfall you can thaw out the meatbags and make them do taxable activities.

Population growth can also occur as a result of immigration.  Think about it, if the meatbags don't like it on desert planet A, they may well hop on the next shuttle and move to lush paradise planet B, which happens to be owned by you.  You can yourself relocate colonists to other colonies if you have a ship free to move them, so maybe there are commerical transports taking people where they want to go.

Each turn = 1 week of game play.

And everything is relative, not absolute, in game terms.

You want realistic? OK. Plant 250M people on a planet. How long before babies are born? 9 months or so? So, around 36-40 weeks (turns) before  the population really starts to grow. 18 years until that growth starts producing taxes and troops (another 936 turns). And several thousand more turns before you get to several billion in population (especially if death rate is also factored in). Do you really want to hit the turn button that many times?

Get real. It is a game!

You can not simply say that 10 years 'in game terms' equals 10 years in 'real world terms'. It simply doesn't work.

As for invasion forces being much smaller...

Do you also take into account resistant forces of the invaded world? How many are needed to subdue an already occupied and developed world?

meznaric, it's a game with its own mechanics. You can nit-pick all you want, but that will not let you enjoy the game for what it really is. And, it is not meant to be a realistic simulation of real-world conditions (like SimCity, for example).

But you CAN make it realistic and still have the game have the same (or even more) amount of fun. The idea is that the colonies are small (population wise) and are there for exploitation of resources which in turn bring prices down at home and allow you to build more stuff in less amount of time. The only way to have more than one planet with loads of people would be to occupy another race, in which case, incidentally, the prices would also go up because you are now shipping same resources to two planets. The resource rush would be far more fun than the colony rush, not least because small colonies are harder to defend.

I don't know if anyone played Mass Effect. The game makes an impression of pretty small colonies where corporations are going to other planets just for resources. Imagine the strategic depth such a game could have if transferred to a turn based form (with the GalCiv story, of course).

OK, but I am not bothered by the scale of the planets. I mean just look how big the ships look. I see that as a representation of the actual ships/planets/whatever currently in the sector in question. So I really don't mind the planets being too big or too small. I don't think this has anything to do with realism just with accurate representation (which isn't necessary for a realistic game). The game mechanics, though, are a totally different story. They could be made realistic and not hamper the funness of the game.

Games with realistic populations, times and scales tend to be very boring - because it begins to resemble real management of real problems, which have limited appeal to the general population, and to the general gaming population.

One of the ways to deal with population is to simply imagine that planets everywhere have plastic populations that contract or shrink depending on what's internally consistent.

When you ship 250 billion people to a planet, it could either be that you're really sending trillions there but only 250 are citizen-soldiers, or that the planet is already colonized by unaligned and unproductive natives and you're sending 250 citizens to build an outpost and harness the planet's resources.

When I say "250," it's meant in context, of course, as in "only 250 billions."  We don't know how a trillion people might live on a planet.  We don't even know if interstellar travel is plausible.  Arguing reality in a sci-fi game is just - weird.

Roxlimn,

It's 250 MILLION, not billion. That's still a WHOLE lot for one ship.

5/6s of the population of a NATION--on a SHIP! Yes, that's a lot.

Put that in perspective, Babylon 5 always was imagined as having "a half-million humans and aliens" living on the station. A space station will be *much* bigger than a single colony ship. But it has 1/5th the population. I presume they're in sleeper-stasis, as that's the only way that is viable. 250 billion? Not even plausible. Not on a ship. Not in a world.

RangerSG:

"Billion" was a mistype.  I'm clarifying that now.

250 million isn't that large.  It only appears large by Western standards because you guys demand so much living space.  You don't actually need that much space.  The Philippines has less than half the landmass of California and we got close to 100 million here already, none of whom are in stasis.