Game allows forced overpopulation

from GalCiv3 Forums

At this moment the game allows you to forcefully overpopulate a planet and thereby generate more production, research and/or wealth on that planet than otherwise possible. Since the overpopulation-death-rate for a planet is a fixed 0.1 pop per turn the workforce does not diminish rapidly. These two facts give rise to the following 'cheat' /strategy:

1) have a large planet generate lots of population: Birthing subsidies;
2) conquer/colonize a planet, and overpopulate it;
3) build up the planet really fast, even when you don't have the wealth to buy improvements, by building an improvement every turn;
4) when the planet is fully operational, move the 'excess' population to the next planet;
5) rinse and repeat. 

When you use this strategy to take a planet near (on in) the enemies territory and then fill it with culture improvements, the enemy planets (culture) flip faster than a street hustler card trick. I play tested this and without invading a single planet was able to completely culture flip a small galaxy with 3 (godlike) adversaries well under a 100 turns.

The solution would be to either disallow colonizers and transporters to unload more people than the maximum population limit onto a planet or kill the overpopulation really fast (think of it as starvation).

In another of my threads i have proposed such an overpopulation-death-formula.

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Reply #1 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

Wow!

In #3 do you mean just go well into debt buying improvements? If so that would clearly be a limiting factor.

Reply #2 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

It should be proportional to the population, the death rate that is. Like 10% of population or whatnot.

I guess if they factor in growth, population, and the limit i think a better equation could be made?

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Reply #3 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

Quoting eviator, reply 1

Wow!

In #3 do you mean just go well into debt buying improvements? If so that would clearly be a limiting factor.

@eviator,

you can not buy an improvement if you don't have the gold, but by having an overpopulation you can have sufficient production power on the planet to build improvements 'naturally'. Imagine the production of 200 billion people on an 8 billion population world.

Therefor lack of money is not limiting this strategy: Planets and shipyards simply continue to build normally, and production can still be converted to research with the "Research project". Wealth really only influences your buying power and happiness. So no star bases after the free ones, but who needs them anyway in this scenario. And lack of happiness only takes away positive growth/production/research bonuses, but does not give you any maluses. Population does not shrink under any circumstances as long as you are beneath the population limit, so who cares in this case for happiness on those planets.

Win the game by being heavily into debt, but you will be a cultural superpower.

Reply #4 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

Quoting DARCA1213, reply 2

It should be proportional to the population, the death rate that is. Like 10% of population or whatnot.

I guess if they factor in growth, population, and the limit i think a better equation could be made?

It should be far beyond 10% if the population massively exceeds the population limit - see the formula i proposed in the initial posting in the other thread. For example if you stuff 200 billion people on a 8 billion population world the starvation should be something like 198 billion ('scarce food/water overcompensation effect'). Thereby bringing this world to 2 billion and it should restart growing back to it's natural limit of 8 billion.

If there is limited overpopulation the starvation should be proportional to the amount of people above the natural population limit.

Reply #5 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

The over population penalty for no food 'should' send your planet to zero happiness an this in turn should HALT all production till population comes in line with that planets cap. This is not the case as a zero happiness has no effect on production. 

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Reply #6 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

Quoting Larsenex, reply 5

The over population penalty for no food 'should' send your planet to zero happiness an this in turn should HALT all production till population comes in line with that planets cap. This is not the case as a zero happiness has no effect on production. 

Immigrating settlers onto an existing population should by itself cause a negative penalty, beyond the population implications.