Actually, its funny that you mention that because when i saw how they ranked population i cracked up. BUT then i looked at it from their point of view and it made mroe sense.

If you make it 8 billion or 9 billion for a terran it sounds good. But an ice planet, having about 1/4 population of a fully upgraded terran planet, should have about 2 billion, right? Well then i don't see how only 2 billion people can live on an ice planet. Just because its cold dosen't mean you can't grow enough crops for a couple billion more. AND lava planets have about the same pop cap as ice and how the hell does a magma coated, fiery inferno have the same survival chance as a measely little cold planet that you can actually walk on? No, i think numbers make it simpler. It makes the average gamer forget of such a strange numerical system.

It's abstract, AFAIK.

Er...okay. That doesn't really change the fact that you just cant manage 180 billion people on one planet. Think housing, transportation, *waste disposal* (there is a huge problem in India with waste disposal, and their population stands at 1 billion).

@ Shibfilet & Kryo
Okay, so the population is displayed as an abstract number...okay, well...at least make it an abstract percentage. I would rather watch a percentage meter go down then sit there and wonder how many people 180/180 is supposed to represent.
*shrug* just my opinion   

I thought somewhere blair said that the population on a planet remains largely constant due to this being trader space, and that the colonists you send down to a planet are only administrators who essentially rule over those 8-9 billion people already living on the surface. This would make sense as to why the numbers are roughly the same on volcanic and ice planets, because you would need plenty of disaster relief officials.

not to sound rude but,

Or maybe having all your planets that you just nuked to zero population magically going back to full pop would be kinda... weird?

as for the Max Pop figure, I think that it's a strategy game and they are trying to make the details that 'dont really matter' as simple as possible, and really no matter what numbers you picked for the maximum populations, the devs would constantly have someone telling them why one number or the other should be changed.

If you want to, you could say 'the maximum number of population is the percentile of the number of people on Earth on the date in which space was finally colonized.' and that the reason Ice and Volcanic planets are roughly the same is because the people are living above the world itself and are drawing minerals and energy from that planet. The volcanic planet obviously provides energy through the form of heat, whereas the ice planet would give energy through stored solar radiation or through scientific use of some mineral found within the planet.

eetmorsqrls, I meant that when you colonize a neutral planet (the ones that haven't been railed where the sun don't shine).

Ohh, I see Advalary. But are you counting the governing officials and the disastor relief guys as population?

stupid, flaming katanas are for the advent! sheesh