Population Woes

[Lafe Sparhawk (OP)]

Hello fellow Colonial Administrators,
I started my game at 500mil population. At this level I have found that I just can't keep up with my industry. With all the installations needed to expand, improve, and defend my colonies they continually have a worker shortage. Of course you can see all the ills of not having enough workers. I'm also having difficulty keeping my mineral output high enough to keep up with manufacturing. Maybe I have expanded my economy at too high a rate and should rein in my manufacturers. Now, I understand how easy it would be to play Deity and pad my population, but I'm more interested in hearing how others tackle the challenge of balancing manufacturing sector growth to population and mineral acquisition.

Lafe

[Steve Walmsley]

Hello fellow Colonial Administrators,
I started my game at 500mil population. At this level I have found that I just can't keep up with my industry. With all the installations needed to expand, improve, and defend my colonies they continually have a worker shortage. Of course you can see all the ills of not having enough workers. I'm also having difficulty keeping my mineral output high enough to keep up with manufacturing. Maybe I have expanded my economy at too high a rate and should rein in my manufacturers. Now, I understand how easy it would be to play Deity and pad my population, but I'm more interested in hearing how others tackle the challenge of balancing manufacturing sector growth to population and mineral acquisition.

You will tend to run into different shortages in different games. It happens to be population in this one but that isn't necessarily a factor of starting size as larger pops will start with more factories anyway. There are a couple of ways to tackle pop growth. The easiest is to look for administrators with bonuses to population growth. The second is to found a lot of colonies. Population grows much faster on small colonies (about 10% per year compared to 2-3% for a 500m pop). Getting a few smaller colonies up and running will increase population faster than the same total population on one colony.

Steve

[mrwigggles]

I ran into a money shortage, I what I ended up doing was staggering my progression between two of three things, ship building, research or construction. I couldn't afford to do all three, but I could do to with very little loss or very little gain. I ended up completing the colony on mars, sending enough mineral to build a commercial space port, and finance center on Earth to /slowly/ bolster the econ, to the point where it would pay for one of the three money drainers.

I was killed off before I could see if this strat was going to work. It seem to be, I had to be careful with how many finance centers, as their build points could balloon costs.