What is wrong with GalCiv 2

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.

The way it works it's not actually population increasing as one normally thinks of it, but rather you have gained more citizens who are paying tax.

Think of it like Starship Troppers. You can be a member of society but not a citizen unless you make the effort to join.

It's kinda the same thing. Your population was already 20B per planet, or whatever, what you see is a greater percent of that population reporting their earnings and paying tax on them as they are now citizens. As such the reported population is increased.

Population = number of Citizens paying tax. Not the actual population of any planet, that is for your imagination.

It's a small thing i know but that is how it is was originally in DL. How they then Aphrodesiac and Fertility Accel fit into that i don't know, but the original lore of the game was as i mentioned.

It's even touched on in some of the flavor text in the GNN reports.

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.

However irrational population growth might seem to be, it's a game & not precisely reality. Gameplay probably needs these weird figures and yet even some more tweaky esoteric values to strike reasonable balance between turns & calendar pace (virtual fiction or otherwise, btw).

As for invasion & colonization transfer of responsabilities (somehow), i *AM* the corporation and i perceive the impact over such issues as being the result of my own decisions, good or bad. The less simulation, the more strategic this game feels.

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!

I have to say the numbers and story in Galactic Civ have always bugged me too, I try to get into the game, and seeing unrealistic numbers, like billions of people on my transports, or story inconsistencies in the story of the game, is kinda jarring since the rest of the game works to be consistent.

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.

Except you have a maximum of 8.1B * (1 + majors + minors) = 145.8B pop combined in all civilizations at the start of the game, so where are they all immigrating from?

This goes back to the if everyone lives on the home planets already, why are less than 1% of them paying taxes, and why would I foot the bill for the colony ship to transport them to a new world so that they would pay taxes question.

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Having the timescale be months as it was in GC1 rather than weeks (and hopefully this will happen for GC3, if only to make elections and the UP have more of a presence) would have the side effect of making the population numbers somewhat more realistic, as at a 4% growth rate per turn this is only 0.72 children per birth per couple without a cap (as exists now), or 0.3375 children per birth per couple with the current 150M value at 100% planetary approval.

Expecting GC2 or even GC3 to get into the complexities surrounding when those who are born can enter, for lack of a better way to put it, the "breeding pool", is wishful thinking at best, though.  It is, after all, just a game.

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).

Who said there were couples?  I always fantasiz.... err i mean figured that it was billions of fertile women and me the guy flying the ship.

If you want more realistic, simply pretend that each turn is a year and not just a week.

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).

Heres my favorite thread about how unrealistic the game is. Dealing with scale instead of population.  

   https://forums.galciv2.com/160118

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.

Heck, even i was absorbed by Fragile Allegiance (in '96) which does have the corporate gimmicks added and the strictly basic reasoning remains; games are meant to alter *or mimic* some reality. GC2 (of the third Millenium) simply does the former.

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.

Wow, that sounds a lot like Obamanomics.

You know, like how they don't seem to know the difference anymore between hundreds, thousands, millions, billions and trillions of dollars?  

(Much like your offhand remark about sending trillions of people to a planet (from a single planet, by the way), when you would need a planet the size of Jupiter to produce/contain that many people. And a planet that size would not be habitable for humans on either end of the equation, in any case.  We only have ~6 billion people on Earth, and it is already overcrowded. Do you realize what the conditions would be like if we had but a single trillion people on this planet? And how could a mere 250 people actually harness the resources of an entire planet (or conquer it, in the case of soldiers)?)

Heck, even the Merriam-Webster OnLine Dictionary doesn't (or can't because of a fundamental lack of understanding?) define the terms - million, billion, trillion - in any meaningful (much less mathematical) sense!

Maybe the current administration simply plays too much GalCiv2, and has been brainwashed by its invitation to relativize and minimize everything.

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.

With the invention of hyperspace, people are mobile.  If your approval is high, people on your planet or from other civilizations' planets migrate to join you, thereby boosting your population tremendously.  I can live with this explanation. 

Well, the universe is infinitely big.  We only play the game on a small portion (the game screen) of the universe.  People could migrate from outside this space or come from another dimension.  Didn't the Thalans just did that?

They are paying taxes to the other governments on the planet.  Our job is to make our government the most popular one on this planet (by providing jobs and entertainment) so that everybody will pay their taxes to us.

What is better than making our govt the dominant one on this planet?  Why, making our govt the most dominant one in even more planets!

Roxlimn,

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

About 5/6s of the population of the US.  Not a whole lot.

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.

If we weren't doing things as inefficiently as we are, we could comfortably handle 250 billion on Earth.  (Crunch the numbers sometime.  You'll be surprised at the upper "limit".)  But that doesn't mean I think it's a good idea, either.

And assuming we ever run across a class 29 (or class A, if you prefer), given that Earth is supposedly equivalent to a class 10, the population limit for that should be even higher...within reason, of course.  "Within reason" for GC2 is 22B or less, because that's when the morale goes all to hell and makes it no longer worth it-but that's a game mechanic, which doesn't necessarily equate with reality.  "Within reason" for real life would probably be about 5x what our "standard" limit for an Earth-quality is, whatever that turns out to be.

However, I don't disagree with your general point.

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.