So, I began my Federation game on a Huge map, Desnse Stars, Dense Planets and Many Minor Races. I start scouting the surrounding stars and holy-monkey-with-a-loaded-gun... the Talthia Borealis system has a max population of 540! Now I don't know if this is common in the game to have such a ripe melon but on BotF, my highest ever discovered system was something in the region of 420. The other bonus is that it has a mutitude of different planets, meaning that I can give it loads of different buildings that require certain planets. Hurrah!

Only thing is, I colonised that gigantoristic system within the first ten turns. I'm on turn 80 and that thing is only half way done. Perplexed, I study the growth of the population and discover that it's increasing at an almighty 1 per turn... hmm, stange anomaly me thinks. So I checked the figures and with a growth rate of 4.9% and a population of 265 I should be getting 13 billion (or million, I'm not sure what the number represents exactly) new Federationlings per turn, right?

I was just wondering if anyone else had encountered this. Whether it is just a random glitch that I've fallen foul of. I dare say it's the universe's way of giving me something awesome, but tainting it with ample supplies of meany-face.

There is one possible explanation for the problem. Have you built any growth rate increasing structures? There used to be a bug where these structures actually eliminated population growth. The problem is now fixed, but there are several different structures that can increase population growth now, and i'm not sure what effect having multiple growth rate increasing structures in the same system will have on the game.

We purposely increased the number of population units in the game because many people were experiencing population shortages even in their home systems. The increase in the amount of buildable objects means that systems need more energy and food, but this meant systems barely had any population left to provide industrial or research output. So we increased the population limits and increased energy output by 25%. However, increasing the population sizes also reduced the growth rate sof the systems. Growth rates are dynamically calculated by the game, instead of having some arbitrary number set in a table. I don't know how exactly it works them out though. But on average, larger systems do seem to have lower growth rates, so this is possibly a bug.

Ah, yes I think I did build two population growth buildings. I forget what they were called exactly, Purification Facility or something... anyway, they both had the same name.

Ah yes the Purification Works. The Purification Works were *supposed* to be buildable in any system that had a Terran *or* an Oceanic *or* a Jungle planet. A bug in the editor meant that it ended up needing systems with a Terran *and* an Oceanic *and* a Jungle planet, which are obviously pretty rare systems. So I created three separate buildings with the same name instead; one for each planet type, with only a single planet requirement each.

Mike has now fixed the editor glitch, but since the editor currently doesn't work (He's working on a brand new editor, so didn't bother to update it to make it compatible with the game) I an't go back and remove the additional buildings; people will have to wait for the release of Editor 3 before I can therefore fix this issue, as well as a number of other database changes that are needed.

There are other population-increasing structures though, such as Atmospheric Condensers (Deserts), Advanced Irrigation Networks (Barrens), and Ice Breaking Stations (Arctics), so the removal of the additional Purification Works won't have an adverse affect on system growth rate.

Of course, increasing pop means increasing food consumption, which means putting more pop in farms, or in power facilitites if more food structures are built, so in the end the benefit is relative...



Actually, they are numbers set in a table. 1~5% depending on inhabitability. The *weighted average* for the system is then calculated based on system composition. Very straightforward. So it doesn't have to do with systems being larger or not, it depends on the size *and* habitability of *planets* composing the system. An Ideal (5%) Giant planet will most likely increase pop growth.

It *has* to be more than this because I checked the planetary growth rates of all five Empire home systems before and after the change, .Iceman. Sol and Cardassia lost 0.2% growth rate, Qo'NoS lost 0.1%, Omarion stayed the same, and Romulus gained 0.1%. The actual sizes of the planets and their classes remained the same, all that I changed was the physical number of people per planet hospitality level, and the changes were relatively small as you know, with small, hostile planets gaining 5 population and giant, ideal planets gaining 20 population.

It's not. Check the numbers.
Omarion stayed the same because it only has *one* planet, ideal. So rate stays at 5%.
Romulus increased because it has 2 ideal planets, and the rest are pretty much favorable.
The others are not so favorable, hence the decrease.
It's all math, it's all there.
In simple terms: average (#pop * growthRate)

And that's why Drahcir's eyes glazed over. =P

You're not alone there, Drahcir. Our eyes are glazed over together.