Joker41NAM wrote on Sat, 18 September 2004 18:54

OK, that's it. I've obviously hit a nerve that I wasn't aware existed. I'm now asking for one of 2 things: 1) All I want is the equation for how fast population grows based upon Value, Cap, and how PRT/LRTs influence the before-mentioned equation. I don't care about which you think is better, 25% or 50% or 33%. I just want the equations. If you don't have something to contribute on this SPECIFIC question, either shut up or start your own thread. 2) Should people not be able to follow this, I ask that the moderator either lock or delete this thread, whichever it takes. I have no interest in getting into the debate that has kidnapped this thread. Now, if people listen to me, there should be maybe one or two posts remaining to this thread. You can have your debate on your own time, and in your own thread.

Please take your attitude elsewhere. You do not own this thread, or this message board, and nobody has the right to say "Get out of my thread".

era42 wrote

So at 25%, the 332200 people grow by 62800 (19%). At 34%, first 25% (332200) grow 19%, the remainding 114800 people (447k-332k) grow by 3400 (66200-62800), or by 2.96%. Quite far from 19%... Dividing those extra 114,8k people (from 25% to 34%) on 3 (to keep them below 25%) 20% worlds will grow 0.2*0.19=3.8%. Minor, but clear improvement even on crappy 20% worlds. Much more noticeable when you shift the extra people to good greens.

I don't know where you came up with your 2.96% growth for the remaining colonists. What happens at 33% is that the total population grows at (I think) 15% which was mentioned earlier in this thread by Staz, provided race wizard growth rate is 19%.

Downsider wrote

But you will have more factories and mines where you have more pop and, lets face it, factories and resources are paramount, not colonist growth. Otherwise IS would be far more powerful than it is already. Keeping worlds at 25% is best in terms of maximizing your colonist growth, but it is not practical in real Stars! terms. If you keep your HW at 25% as soon as it reaches it and I keep mine at 33% likewise, I will have better economy and research than you over in short term and can make that advantage work for me over the long term.

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A good way to get to grips with pop management is to practice playing a -f race. So start duelling

Formulas aside, the realities of finding planets, shipping pop, having the right tech to do it efficiently, not having enough minerals to build said transporters cannot be ignored.

Personally, I aim to keep breeders at 25% and ship pop to get other breeders going first. Once they are up and running, they fill up nearby poor hab worlds to max as quickly as possible. Once they are full I aim to fill up my big worlds one/two at a time.

Notice the word aim. Quite often my HW suddenly needs filling up as I decide to up production ready for war. Plenty of other factors intervene, location being a prominent consideration - unless you are IT ofc.

Odd as it may seem, it's nice to have some very green, poor mineral planets. There is never any doubt about what to do with them. Just keep them shipping out pop for all they are worth.

To summarise, practise the art of pop management, develop your own heuristic method, bearing in mind those "ideal" %'s. For a -f in a practise situation, a single immunity race with 19% PGR should have about 4.5k res and tech 10/10/7/10/3/3 by 2430 (that was a WM). JoaT's and IT can do better. No doubt if I spent the time maximising every area of my pop-management I could do better, but I'm more interested in playing the game than playing with a calculator.

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Hi!

goober wrote on Sun, 19 September 2004 03:51

A good way to get to grips with pop management is to practice playing a -f race.

Even better way is to start testbedding with 3-immune HE. You'll see that the best result (most pop and resources) you get by holding breeders (all planets ) at 25% most of the time.
BR, Iztok

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I thought things like pop growth are discussed to death. Before building 10 large freighters and testing the growth at every kt... maybe ask yourself can it be it hasnt been done before? Judging by result amount that googling rec.games.computer.stars gives... it should be to death.

craebild wrote on Sun, 19 September 2004 01:06

JoAT has 110% max. population

Little repair. JOAT has 120% max population.

25% is most profitable hold while there is someplace to go. Usual HG does not run out of such places before 2420. Using 25% hold instead of 33% gives about 20% better year 2450 result in testbed.

33% grows most people, but amount difference is insignificant from 25%. It is profitable to use such hold for sending pop to yellows (since the pop does not grow at yellows anyway). Why its bad for initial spreading is also clear. The pop above 25% just mushrooms there while it can grow at other places at lot better rate. At 33% hold you arrive to all places 3 turns later and successful competition about best planets is often both matter of few turns and key to victory. If you want to arrive later take LSP.

50% can be other useful hold. After it growth starts to drop rather rapidly. Tests show that for filling a planet from its own growth (filling freighters at orbit until there is another 50% and then dropping)... 50% is the optimum. Filling does not happen as quick as with 33%, 25% or 42%(same growth as 25%) but the sum resources from planet are the biggest.

The holds over 50% are useless from growing perspective.

The growth formula is given in lots of places and FAQ-s. It is more or less correct formula for growth. Actual growth makes little sawtooth difference from that formula and also differs from year to year. It is seemingly because planet value is calculated with accuracy 0.1% and pop at planet is kept with accuracy 1 while displayed with accuracy 100. It gives some interesting but quite useless results. For example at OBRM IT HW the actual latest spot where it grows at racial rate is 276,000 pop not 275,000 ... and so on.

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Quote:

Personally, I aim to keep breeders at 25% and ship pop to get other breeders going first. Once they are up and running, they fill up nearby poor hab worlds to max as quickly as possible. Once they are full I aim to fill up my big worlds one/two at a time.

Keep in mind that you're not really maxing these low greens, but instead providing max capacity until your next research level into terraforming.

The strategy as described in the quotation marks works well if you've either reached the maximum tech level for your own terraforming ability ([to generalise] level 16 in Weap, Prop and Energy if non-TT) or if borders with all neighbours are well defined and expansion looks unlikely (in that case you're not aggressive enough ). You do also want to acquire smaller green worlds, but maxing them out too early means that not only are those worlds growing zero pop for you, but the pop to max them out could instead have been used on a planet with greater potential for growth.
IMHO, you should wait on maxing out those small greens. You might eventually be able to make them 100% (or close) and they in turn could become breeders or resource contributers for you.
Meanwhile they're building factories/mines and terraforming. They're gradually becoming stronger on their own steam (assuming that you at least gave them a starting chance) and eventually with greater terraform research could become powerhouses in their own right and as a bonus, grew their own small amount of colonists.
Now of course there are always exceptions and I'm not saying that mine is a hard and fast rule, but it's a good general concept to keep in mind (no doubt there will be some who disagree ).

Quote:

With a JOAT and OBRM, 35% is the money spot.

Quote:

I've tried running some tests, and gotten rough numbers. Thing is, when I've done it, I've actually gotten 2 places that got the same growth rate, but the pop numbers were several thousand apart. I know that I once saw somebody on this forum give the formulae and exact percentages (I think they were 33.49% and 34.99%), but I can't find it again.

Quote:

You just might want to consider staying at 25%, especially at the start of the game. 33% and thereabouts give the highest popgrowth, 25% gives the highest *percentual* growthrate (iow, your growthrate in the racedesign wizard).

Now regarding the general concept of keeping 25% on breeder worlds: I do agree with this in principle and it's far easier to follow it through with a tri-immune race, but under normal circumstances a couple of good worlds (that also happen to be high in minerals), eg. a 85% and 75% world might have a few worlds within the vicinity that are green but could range from only 20% - 40%. In this real game scenario, shipping too many colonists from such good worlds "can be" a waste. To build factories/mines on a planet growing up to 25% capacity takes a good many years. Building those extra installations in making the worlds 35% is comparitively very quick. The "actual" amount of colonists produced on the good worlds is now higher and the resources available are substantially increased.

True, the small worlds would also produce colonists and resources given a chance, but often not enough to make colonising them a priority. It would suck though if you produced lots of excess colonists on these 75% - 85% worlds and then found that neighbours had stolen these smaller greens from under your nose.

The point being that it's a balancing act and every situation is different. Sometimes it's good to follow the 25% max colonists rule to the letter and sometimes it's actually better to go much higher. Depends on so many factors as to what is best that no one can really say unless they look at a specific situation.

[Updated on: Sun, 19 September 2004 11:00]

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craebild wrote on Sat, 18 September 2004 18:06

The formula for population growth can be found here: http://www.starsfaq.com/advfaq/guts2.htm#4.9 The influence from PRTs and LRTs is AFAIR: HE has 50% max. population JoAT has 120% max. population OBRM gives +10% max. population after adjustment for PRT.

Thanks, craebild, era42, and Kotk (modified quote for correction). From the info you gave, I was finally able to track down the post I've been looking for:

http://starsautohost.org/sahforum/index.php?t=msg&th= 1425&rid=572&S=865d375c85712d144f9fd4b6c0acb0c0& pl_view=&start=0#msg_11228

My own experiments have roughly confirmed these numbers, though it can be hard to get everything right when working to a hundredth of a percent

This is my closer for the thread. You can have your argument on your own time.

SnakeChomp wrote on Sat, 18 September 2004 18:55

Joker41NAM wrote on Sat, 18 September 2004 18:54 OK, that's it. I've obviously hit a nerve that I wasn't aware existed. I'm now asking for one of 2 things: 1) All I want is the equation for how fast population grows based upon Value, Cap, and how PRT/LRTs influence the before-mentioned equation. I don't care about which you think is better, 25% or 50% or 33%. I just want the equations. If you don't have something to contribute on this SPECIFIC question, either shut up or start your own thread. 2) Should people not be able to follow this, I ask that the moderator either lock or delete this thread, whichever it takes. I have no interest in getting into the debate that has kidnapped this thread. Now, if people listen to me, there should be maybe one or two posts remaining to this thread. You can have your debate on your own time, and in your own thread. Please take your attitude elsewhere. You do not own this thread, or this message board, and nobody has the right to say "Get out of my thread".

No, I don't. However, where I come from it's considered polite to keep to the topic asked about in a thread. The thread is considered to be owned by the person who created it. I normally only post on a forum that gives the creator control to lock or delete the thread, if it goes too far. If I knew of another Stars forum where this was the case, I'd use it.

So, I've made my last post on this thread, and will not be looking at it any more. If you guys don't have the common courtesy to keep the the requested topic, that's not my problem. Though you won't fine me posting much, either. It's not worth my time to wade through the junk to get at the stuff I want. When I made this, I expected to get maybe 3 responses. In the end, that's about how many were relevant to my question.

Yes, I blew my top a bit in this post and my previous one. No, I'm not going to apologize for it.

[Updated on: Tue, 12 October 2004 22:19] by Moderator

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Joker - I know you're not reading this thread any more but I can't resist

Original post:

Quote:

If I'm trying to maximize the growth rate of a planet (I'm not interested in maximizing population or resources, just how fast colonists make babies), what is the ideal setting? I know it's somewhere in the vicinity of 33%, but I'm looking for an exact figure. It seems like I once saw that it's about 35%, and a little less if you have the OBRM LRT.

Throwing toys out of pram post...

Quote:

1) All I want is the equation for how fast population grows based upon Value, Cap, and how PRT/LRTs influence the before-mentioned equation. I don't care about which you think is better, 25% or 50% or 33%. I just want the equations. If you don't have something to contribute on this SPECIFIC question, either shut up or start your own thread.

You ask for a number and then get stroppy when we don't give you an equation.

[This sub-thread should probably be moved to the bar or circular file if there is a moderator watching]

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Downsider wrote on Sat, 18 September 2004 23:15

Keeping worlds at 25% is best in terms of maximizing your colonist growth, but it is not practical in real Stars! terms. If you keep your HW at 25% as soon as it reaches it and I keep mine at 33% likewise, I will have better economy and research than you over in short term and can make that advantage work for me over the long term. I am willing to duel anyone who disagrees

As long as you play a factoryless race.

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