The (bigger and bigger) drop colonists bug

[Nibelung44 (OP)]

Hi,

I guess I'm not alone in having identified how the behavior of civilians colony ships is in-appropriate. In a nutshell, once a world has enough infrastructure to support the current population, then almost all civilians colony ships head to it, intent on dumping hundred of thousands of poor souls onto it.

Case in point, I had enough infrastructures to sustain 250.000 colonists on Europa. I noticed a lot of civilian traffic toward the world, and a few days later, the population soared to 4.33 millions, with a death rate in the 300%.

This is quite easily reproducible. I often have to teleport back the population to Earth with SM. How do you deal with that, because it affects all games probably.

[telegraph]

I had that bug in 6.2, then Steve claimed to fix part of it(it was unclear how much of it was fixed)

Right now I control how much colonists get migration permit: I keep colonies as destinations, and only turn Earth to source once I am sure that enough of civilian infrastructure is ready for export. Since I have several colonies, and those have some extra infrastructure (as they were destinations while no one had migration permit.) colony ships can do several runs before infrastructure becomes a constraint. Then I turn Earth (and all other big colonies) to stable again.

[Paul M]

This is what I call "The Dump" the problem is fixable, and I have suggested how it could be done, but at the moment the issue is that you have a colony with space available to support people and every colony ship sees that space and says "oh look I have a population on board that would nicely fill that" and then off they merrily go.  So suddenly you have not 50,000 colonists landing in the space for 70,000 but 50,000*n (where n is the total number of colony ships the civillian lines have).  The next result is a massive loss of life.

For Callisto I actually built first 575 infrastructure (sufficient for 1 million people) since the lines had 950,000 capacity (18-19 colony ships x 50,000 per ship).  The first dump put 1.23 million people on callisto.  I had forgot to turn nearby Europa off as a source of colonists and the result was -38% growth.  *sigh*  It was also such that I didn't manage to get the full 575 infrastructure moved or my seed colony planted before the colony ships broke orbit and charged...but I had something like 520 infrastructure so it wasn't an utter catasrophy.

The ships need to have flags and a roster (to prevent one line from hogging all the bussiness) and this problem is solved by a few loops through a simple program check.

Basically also the new colony hogs all available resources for a while because everytime you get a bit of infrastructure space the whole n-colony ships show up to dump yet more colonists there.  This goes until the population exceeds 25 million and then you stop it.  I've only seen it stop earlier when there is basically nothing interesting going on (Ganymede and Venus for me have been utterly stable for years). 

It isn't a bug in the usual sense of things, it is just the programming isn't sufficiently well implemented.  But the fix requires a loop, and several variables and isn't trivial to do...but it is straightforward.