is because the player does have to pay attention to their colonies instead of just setting them on autopilot and checking every couple years to make sure the civvies haven't depopulated Earth again. The idea is to add gameplay for colony management.
. . .
So I think to some extent it is maybe not in keeping with this design to expect a lot of automation which would just be turned on by most players and ignored, and where is the fun in that?
As it stands, we have very limited means of interacting with the colonies along those lines. What I'm asking for in a general sense is a way to
interact with the new system. The temp swings will only add micromanagement if we don't have some way of interfacing with them.
Say you decide to set up a mining colony on a body that will be very high CC in 20 years. How is the player supposed to interact with the colony as the CC creeps up over the years, before it spikes to the max value, and slowly comes back down? You can't prepare ahead of time by shipping excess colonists out, because the more you ship out the faster natural growth will refill it. Even when the pop is reduce to 0, there is still somehow natural growth. As it stands, all you can really do is either deal with the "unrest due to overpopulation" messages until everyone dies off, or futilely fight against the pops trying to move into infrastructure that will be needed to keep everyone alive later by sending colony ships continuously at them.
If the extent of automation is checking a box and forgetting about an entire game system, you have a point. But the way you fix that is by making the process of setting up the automation interesting. Look no further than factorio to see how automating the tedium away can be fun in and of itself.
My suggestions weren't completely off-the-cuff:
Pop caps could be a simple as not letting pops grow into more infracture than will be needed at max CC, they could be manually set, or they could be some combo of automatic and manual. This would effectively allow the player to earmark infrastructure as emergency use only.
Mass hibernation complexes would be something you'd need to build, and each one would only hold so many pops. Their travel weight and production costs could be high or low for different balance reasons. They would allow the player to essentially pause the planet, and could have a startup and shutdown time (like industries in VB). This would make the planet useless while hibernating, but would prevent people dying by the millions, and bypasses the issue of trying to fight against the repopulation systems.
A way to depopulate an planet without abandoning it could be as simple as a button that stops colony ships dropping off colonists and stops any natural pop growth (with a hit to unrest or other downside to prevent abuse). This would allow the population to be evacuated en-mass for an indeterminate amount of time without more people growing from rocks or whatever. A second button could even be added, marking the colony as "being evaced", which would allow the civil colony ships to reduce the population to zero (the government might have to pay the civs instead of the reverse for this service).
I'm not picky about the tools we're given to interact with the new system. But we currently don't have
any tools I'm aware of to do anything that's not inefficient, micro-intensive, and involves fighting against other game systems.
