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Posted by: Jorgen_CAB
« on: December 21, 2014, 02:11:10 PM »

Quote from: Haji on December 21, 2014, 01:25:27 PM
Population growth is much more complicated issue than that. For example, the current population growth of India (which is a poor nation with poor and not widely available medical aid) is 1.25% while Norway (a very modern socialdemocratic nation) has population growth of 1.19%. Israel (of which I don't know that much, but it seems to be normal, modern society with good medical services) has population growth of 1.46%, more than many poorer nations like Iran, Mexico or Mongolia (sorry if I'm mistaken about the relative wealth of those nations, couldn't be arsked to double-check). So that's definitely oversimplification. For that matter, the fact that even modern nations like UK, France or US have healthy population growth (around 1%) despite having very good (and in Europe free) medicine seems to indicate that population growth will not reach 0%, or at least not for the reasons you outlined.

Also your arguments don't take into account possible other explanations for (relatively) large population growth in Aurora, such as longevity treatment which means that people stop dying. Or ability to store and restore consciousness electronically. Or the fact that default starting date for Aurora is 2025, well before the time we're supposed to reach that equilibrium of ten billion.

Sure... it is difficult to say exactly where and when we will reach an equilibrium but we will reach it at one point quite soon. There has been some pretty accurate studies made and are still made in particular of child births since that is what govern how many people we will be in the future. Medical breakthroughs can obviously also be a factor but I bet most studies include things like increase in average age and things like that. There are some fairly general and accurate information on Wikipedia about this.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projections_of_population_growth

The only place where the rate of child birth are not declining today are Africa...

And yes... US are practically the only non third world nation that we expect to increase population as if it were a third world nation until about 2050... ;)


Quote from: Prince of Space on December 21, 2014, 01:32:55 PM
Taking sloanjh's suggestion and returning to Rich.h's original question, a good use for mineral-free habitable worlds is to serve as farm teams for factory worlds.

If you're like me, and you keep some significant portion of your homeworld's factory capacity busy building more factories, then you'll need more population to keep up with the demand for labor. In my games, once Luna, Mars, And the Galilean moons have populations over 25 million, I set up the immigration settings on the Civilian tab to Supply colonists from those worlds and Demand them back on Earth.

That's a quicker way to get to a large population than just letting them grow naturally, although I've never gotten to a trillion.

Is it even possible to play the game to get a trillion people on a single world, I sincerely doubt that has happened so far.

In any way I usually let my worlds develop on their own after 25m population and once they reach 500m I allow them to send population to minor colonies. This enable me to have lot's of different worlds that increase trade and can specialize on many different functions throughout a wide spreading empire. Although I only allow gravity to be from +/- 0.4 from 1 so the numbers of worlds are very few where I don't require subterranean infrastructure, so neither Luna nor Mars is viable planets for large colonization. Venus on the other hand is the only terrestrial planet in Sol with potential for human colonization.
Posted by: Prince of Space
« on: December 21, 2014, 01:32:55 PM »

Taking sloanjh's suggestion and returning to Rich.h's original question, a good use for mineral-free habitable worlds is to serve as farm teams for factory worlds.

If you're like me, and you keep some significant portion of your homeworld's factory capacity busy building more factories, then you'll need more population to keep up with the demand for labor. In my games, once Luna, Mars, And the Galilean moons have populations over 25 million, I set up the immigration settings on the Civilian tab to Supply colonists from those worlds and Demand them back on Earth.

That's a quicker way to get to a large population than just letting them grow naturally, although I've never gotten to a trillion.
Posted by: Haji
« on: December 21, 2014, 01:25:27 PM »

Quote from: Jorgen_CAB on December 21, 2014, 10:28:00 AM
When people know that children will survive to adulthood with modern medicine we simply don't crave more than around 2-3 children per family, something that soon is true all around the earth today.

Population growth is much more complicated issue than that. For example, the current population growth of India (which is a poor nation with poor and not widely available medical aid) is 1.25% while Norway (a very modern socialdemocratic nation) has population growth of 1.19%. Israel (of which I don't know that much, but it seems to be normal, modern society with good medical services) has population growth of 1.46%, more than many poorer nations like Iran, Mexico or Mongolia (sorry if I'm mistaken about the relative wealth of those nations, couldn't be arsked to double-check). So that's definitely oversimplification. For that matter, the fact that even modern nations like UK, France or US have healthy population growth (around 1%) despite having very good (and in Europe free) medicine seems to indicate that population growth will not reach 0%, or at least not for the reasons you outlined.

Also your arguments don't take into account possible other explanations for (relatively) large population growth in Aurora, such as longevity treatment which means that people stop dying. Or ability to store and restore consciousness electronically. Or the fact that default starting date for Aurora is 2025, well before the time we're supposed to reach that equilibrium of ten billion.
Posted by: Jorgen_CAB
« on: December 21, 2014, 10:28:00 AM »

From a realistic point of view there should be a maximum number of population for planets. Earth will reach an equilibrium of population at around 10 billion people (according to studies made in children berths) which don't have much to do with resources or anything but more from cultural and informational reasons. When people know that children will survive to adulthood with modern medicine we simply don't crave more than around 2-3 children per family, something that soon is true all around the earth today.

In the future I guess population growth would rather not grow much unless there is reasons for doing so such as a states encouraging it through economic means or something similar.

In a world such as Aurora with more or less unlimited cheap energy population growth should practically become zero at some point, mainly because of size of a planet, it's geography and technological improvements. People will obviously prefer more space, parks and nature so population would probably reflect this when the technology and educational media exist to maintain a good balance. You would not really see over population in such societies. At least I don't believe you would. At least peoples morale should plummet when planets start to get too crowded.
Posted by: Bryan Swartz
« on: December 20, 2014, 09:20:18 PM »

I don't even want to think about a trillion people.  Earth is just approaching two billion in my universe.  Because I'm just the kind of uber-nerd to do such things, I calculated at the present growth rate that even if that were to stay constant, I'd reach a trillion there sometime around 380 years from now.  I think I might die of old age before reaching that point.  Most likely I'd have one-week processing times per construction cycle :)
Posted by: Jorgen_CAB
« on: December 20, 2014, 11:50:45 AM »

With some simple experimentation I get that you reach 75% maximum people devoted to service industries at 315m people at a zero cost colony.

I also checked and the population increase have no cap on how much it diminishes. At a trillion people I got an Error but it was still decreasing the increase in population and was down below 0.1% per year.

Having a few high population worlds will obviously still be very useful so you can exploit your best governors, but you still want to have lots of colonies to "farm" population and overall resource growth.
Posted by: Haji
« on: December 20, 2014, 11:29:41 AM »

Quote from: Prince of Space on December 19, 2014, 07:51:48 AM
Also, the growth rate should probably be applied at every five day build cycle, rather than applied to a year's worth of growth at once, but as with everything in Aurora, this isn't rocket science we're doing.

If my memory serves while the population growth is given as a yearly figure, the actual population is calculated on a five day cycle basis. This actually means the population growth is slightly higher than given. Let's say you have population growth of 7.2% and population of ten million. If the calculation was applied once you'd get 720k people. However, if my understanding of population growth is correct, you actually get 0.1% population increase every five days, resulting in 746k new people (10 million x 1.001^72 results in population of 10 746 000).

Quote from: sloanjh on December 20, 2014, 09:40:39 AM
In addition, my gut tells me the main manpower savings lies in the fact that a smaller population can devote a higher percentage of its workforce to manufacturing (service sector percentage is smaller if you look at the population breakdown percentages), so moving that 1 million workers to a low population world results in an immediate gain in worker head-count available for your industry.

The population breakdown is as follows: first pick gets agriculture and manufacturing, starting with five percent for habitable planets and additional five percent of population for every 1.0 colony cost (so planet with colony cost 3.0 will always dedicate 20% to agriculture). Second pick gets services, with the percentage changing on the current population. It starts relatively low and caps on 75%. The rest goes to manufacturing. As such a well developed planet with no colony cost would have 5% in agriculture, 75% in civilian sector and 20% in manufacturing. As such planets with small populations get much larger government workforce as a percentage.

However, and this is the important part, the population cap where civilian sector reaches 75% is very easy to reach in most scenarios. I don't know exactly where it is but somewhere between 300 million and 500 million people. And once you reach that cap you no longer have a planet with larger available workforce (as a percentage of population that is). So if you have a number of large colonies (into high millions/low billions), like in the example of the original poster, you won't have any gain in workforce size by spreading out.
Posted by: sloanjh
« on: December 20, 2014, 09:40:39 AM »

Quote from: Prince of Space on December 19, 2014, 07:51:48 AM
I feel like I missed something here. That equation is mathematically correct, but how does it reflect actual population growth in game?

Going off of the formula I found, two worlds with populations of 10 billion each will grow at 0.93%, yielding an additional 93 million on each planet over the course of a year. That's 186 between the two of them. One world with 20 billion will grow at 0.74%, yielding an additional 148 million over the course of a year. The two-planet arrangement produces 38 million more people.

All of this discounts governor bonuses and radiation, and it only holds true above populations of 8 million, when the 10% growth rate maximum no longer applies. Also, the growth rate should probably be applied at every five day build cycle, rather than applied to a year's worth of growth at once, but as with everything in Aurora, this isn't rocket science we're doing.

Edit: some significant figures errors

Father Tim posted before you posted the formula you found.  My vague recollection from many years ago is that the growth rate has a floor - above a certain large population it's constant.  I read his post to mean that he has the same recollection, and that 10 billion is above the threshold that he remembers as being 100 million.  So, if the recollection were correct, splitting the population between two worlds would result in no change of the growth rate.  The equation represents my mathification of his (paraphrased) statement "If the split population is above the size at which the growth floor kicks in, splitting won't change the grow", in rebuttal to a statement that he had gotten his math wrong.

Obviously the formula you found and the experiment you performed disagree with this recollection.  Could mean the recollection is wrong, could mean Steve changed the formula at some point.

EDIT:  Oh wait - just re-read your post.  It's not obvious you performed the experiment in Aurora, as opposed to plugging numbers into the formula.  Someone should probably do the experiment (easy in a clean game) to double-check whether the post you found describes the current behavior.

One other side point - this whole bit of the thread is a bit of a diversion, since in practice you wouldn't actually pick up 10 billion people and ship them to another world.  In practice, you'd move 1 million people from your world of 20 billion to a new colony, where there's no question their growth rate would be higher.  In addition, my gut tells me the main manpower savings lies in the fact that a smaller population can devote a higher percentage of its workforce to manufacturing (service sector percentage is smaller if you look at the population breakdown percentages), so moving that 1 million workers to a low population world results in an immediate gain in worker head-count available for your industry.

John
Posted by: Prince of Space
« on: December 19, 2014, 07:51:48 AM »

Quote from: sloanjh on December 19, 2014, 06:57:40 AM
I believe what Father Tim was saying is 2*(0.01)*(10^9) = (0.01)*(2*10^9).

I feel like I missed something here. That equation is mathematically correct, but how does it reflect actual population growth in game?

Going off of the formula I found, two worlds with populations of 10 billion each will grow at 0.93%, yielding an additional 93 million on each planet over the course of a year. That's 186 between the two of them. One world with 20 billion will grow at 0.74%, yielding an additional 148 million over the course of a year. The two-planet arrangement produces 38 million more people.

All of this discounts governor bonuses and radiation, and it only holds true above populations of 8 million, when the 10% growth rate maximum no longer applies. Also, the growth rate should probably be applied at every five day build cycle, rather than applied to a year's worth of growth at once, but as with everything in Aurora, this isn't rocket science we're doing.

Edit: some significant figures errors
Posted by: sloanjh
« on: December 19, 2014, 06:57:40 AM »

Quote from: Father Tim on December 17, 2014, 12:15:21 PM
Actually, 2x10 billion pop colonies will not grow faster, as 10 billion is already over the limit for minimum pop growth.  As I recall, 100 million is the point where growth hits minimum.
Quote from: 83athom on December 17, 2014, 01:11:45 PM
*sigh* I guess math isn't your strong point. The growth is in a percentage, and if 100 million is where the percentage is smallest (as in it cannot shrink any lower) that means the larger the colony, the more people you get ie 1% of 100,000,000 is 1,000,000 and 1% of 1,000,000,000 is 100,000,000. And I don't think 100 million is the smallest growth. When my population was at 5 billion the growth was at about 1.2%, whereas now it is at 6 billion the growth is at 1.13% meaning that the growth rate percentage is still going down. 1.2% of 5,000,000,000 is 60,000,000 and 1.13% of 6,000,000,000 is 67,800,000, so this means even with the percentage growth is decreasing the population growth is increasing. So simply do the math of the growth of 2 x 10 billion population over 1 x 20 billion. Oh, and to the original question about major benefits, different colonies will produce different trade goods that will influence supply and demand, thus influencing wealth gain.
I believe what Father Tim was saying is 2*(0.01)*(10^9) = (0.01)*(2*10^9).  My reading statement he was commenting on was "2X10B colonies will grow faster than 1X20B".

John
Posted by: MarcAFK
« on: December 19, 2014, 06:02:09 AM »

I would like an option somewhere to limit or stop population growth, even if it was buried in SM mode and only for rp purposes.
Posted by: Jorgen_CAB
« on: December 19, 2014, 01:45:57 AM »

I'm not sure but should not your civilian fleet grow faster with more trade and wealth around?

You also can subsidize the civilian fleet if it is not enough to saturate the trading needs.

Also as you said, demand and supply will matter if you only have two planets both with huge population. They might still demand many of the same goods which obviously reduce the amount you can trade between them.

In general I usually start with relatively low numbers of people in my factions so civilian fleet will grow to quite easily support the trade and increase in population. But if you start the game with no civilian fleet and an Earth with billions of people you might get a civilian fleet that is rather weak.

I also think that it it is unfortunate that planets don't in some way cap population amount based on geography and technology, at least require infrastructure to be built after a certain amount of population. It simply is not realistic to have 30 billion people in one planet when there are other better options available. I mean, you can easily make the Earth moon into a place with 30 billion people which in my view is completely unrealistic. The only way to currently deal with it is through role-play.

From looking at history mankind tend to spread out before cluster up if they can, I believe they would do the same in space if they could. Anything to preserve the species in the long run. New places also give higher chance for personal wealth and exploitations.

I never get campaigns with such huge populations though so it never has been a problem for me.
Posted by: Haji
« on: December 18, 2014, 04:32:59 PM »

While it is true that more colonies will increase trade opportunities it should be pointed out that it's difficult to saturate all the potential trade between even two colonies of ten billion. In my current game a planet of five billion produces over sixty thousand units of goods per year while freighters move ten, twenty or fifty units at once depending on their size. So if you have two colonies then you'll need hundreds of freighters to saturate just one route (it's oversimplification as there is also the matter of demand, not simply production, but the larger point still stands). To be honest, since you have several colonies of five billion or more, adding more planets will likely not result in more trade income, unless their positioning will make them shorten the trade routes, as the earnings depend only on the amount of cargo moved, not distance, so whether your freighter spent five days or five hundred days moving cargo, you'll get the same amount of money.

The population growth has already been covered. As far as I know there is no point where population growth as a percentage becomes constant, so more colonies will always result in larger population growth.

Other than that there really is no reason to spread out, unless you're role-playing.
Posted by: Jorgen_CAB
« on: December 18, 2014, 03:13:48 PM »

It is pretty clear that spreading out your colonies will make your population grow faster as will wealth and trade. With more population you also gain more workers for factories, labs etc...

I usually try to make all my colonies as self sufficient as possible but specialize them in one or two areas, this seem to work just fine. This way all colonies will have at least some ordinary factories in order to build necessary buildings for the colony while I do have certain factory worlds whose main job is to produce auto mines, terraform installations and other more generic stuff for other worlds. You also need local factories to build starbases, financial centers and underground infrastructure, things you will want to have in most places eventually.

I might also spread it out for role-playing reasons. I presume that local governments do think that autonomy is preferable from being forced to rely on other worlds too much, at least for really large worlds with hundreds of millions of people on them, not to mention billions of people. I do have a hard time seeing a planet with several billions of people not being completely self sufficient to the point of building their own fleets,  academies, labs and such. Such planets most likely become sector capitals.

I also always try to make sure planet populations don't go unemployed, at least I want planets to be between 90-100% employed if I can.
Posted by: Prince of Space
« on: December 18, 2014, 10:23:25 AM »

For a more succint answer, here is a post Steve made a few years ago:

Quote from: Steve Walmsley on April 10, 2011, 05:41:26 AM
Colony Growth Rate = 20 / (CurrentPop ^ (1 / 3))

This is capped at 10% before modifications for planetary and sector governors. It is also affected by radiation.

Steve

I think this is still accurate, but I welcome any corrections.