New Colonists
Each construction phase, more colonists will become available at the rate of:
(Length of Construction Phase / Year) * Population * Colonization Pressure
For example, if colonization pressure was 5% and the population was 100m, then a 5-day construction phase would generate (5 / 365) * 100m * 5% = 68,493 colonists. A population of 1 billion with 2% pressure would generate 274,000 colonists every construction phase.
The max number of available colonists at any time will be equal to the annual amount generated. This 'production' of colonists has a side effect of breaking up the shipping line colony ships so they all don't move everywhere together. As shipping line colony ships load colonists they will be deducted from the available colonists total.
Should new colonist production be scaled by the species and/or governor population growth modifier? Given sufficient civilian transport capacity, every core world will eventually drift towards an equilibrium point where emigration is balanced by reproduction. In principle this is fine, but in practice the actual equilibria can vary surprisingly wildly based on local growth rates.
For example, let's consider Earth: homeworld, 12b capacity, colonization pressure 2%. In order to be at its equilibrium point, Earth will need a population with a 2% growth rate. I tried manually playing around with Earth's population in Spacemaster and got the below results:
Species Growth Modifier | Equilibrium (millions) |
2.0 | 5100 |
1.5 | 3400 |
1.25 | 1950 |
1.0 | 1000 |
0.8 | 510 |
0.667 | 300 |
0.5 | 125 |