Well... it doesn't seem to work well as a multiple of a certain population...

Considering that asteroids have 20 population, and fully upgraded terran planets (except for research) have 280 population (ratio of 1:14), its difficult to determine a reasonable number for what 1 population represents.

Earth, as we know already, is a terran planet, and has about 6.76 billion inhabitants as of February 2009 (projected to level off at 9 billion). With that, 1 population would represent about 24 million people, and an asteroid therefore can support about 480 million people...

If you factor in research upgrades, it can be up to 322 population for Advent/Vasari and 364 for TEC. Using the TEC figures (we're probably closest to that faction), the representation of 1 population is 18.6 million using present day figures.

For an asteroid with a fraction of the radius of a planet to support 371 million people (using the 364 population ratio), it seems way too high for such a small body.

That seems to fit, because population growth would be exponential instead of linear.

I have wondered this too, but another thing that gets me is that pirate bases appear to be an asteroid with a massive city on it, but hold 0 population.

I'm not sure if those pop numbers we have at the planets aren't something more like administration and occupation. it sure looks like the planet is nuked to the stone age, but it was not supposed to mean that every single sentient being was in fact wiped out. but I could be wrong there, it's just something I think I picked up in beta so long ago.

It might not agree with canon, but I look at it like this: at game start, all planets are precolonized by independent races that have their own militia. You enslave them when you conquer a planet (economically for the TEC, ideologically/socially for the Advent, and through dominating technology for the Vasari).

When enemies attack your planet, they're basically stripping your control away by removing all of your advances and forcing your population back to the equivalent of the stone age. 

When you colonize, your population climbs so quickly because you're not actually breeding, only building mechanisms that enforce more control and allow you to take advantage of a greater number of the native population.

This is why when you kill a fully developed planet, you can't reuse any of the infrastructure that was previously built by the other race. Even the TEC's attacks look nuclear, they're laid down with precision to destroy only the control devices that the planet's previous owners used to rule it. Their dirty bomb attack is the exception, killing some of the population so you can't recover their numbers for a while.

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What I think would be cool in a future version of Sins is if siege attacks only concentrated on the closely-orbiting nodes, instead of on the planet itself (which of course implies that the nodes would have to be fixed in spaceso you wouldn't have to chase them around the sphere). So the player would have to maneuver his fleet around the planet to destroy all of the nodes and take it over, and that means turrets on the other side of the planet would come into play before it could be fully conquered.

I did the math on the calculator with the terran, desert, asteroid, volcanic, and ice planets.

Since earth has 7 billion people and it shows 280  on terran planets max without research, that means..

7,000,000,000/280 = 25,000,000

So each unit of population represents 25 million people. here is a complete list of populations of researched and not researched planets

Desert (normal): 4.75 billion

Desert (research1): 5.45 billion

Desert (research2): 6.175 billion

Terran (normal): 7 billion

Terran (research1): 8.05 billion

Terran (research2): 9.1 billion

Volcanic (normal): 1.75 billion

Volcanic (researched): 2.275 billion

Ice (normal): 4 billion

Ice (researched): 4.6 billion

Asteroid (solid): 500 million

Keep this list copied and pasted

There is no perfect way relate reality with how population works in the game...the population numbers weren't even chosen to be realistic, but rather to make for balanced gameplay...that being said, since everyone is hell bent on figuring this out....

Population as it exists in sins functions off of a linear absolute growth rate (ie you add a fixed amount of population per unit time independent of your current population)...Sins also has a linear tax rate (ie each unit of population increases tax income by the same amount), suggesting that the population values do not represent a logarithmic scale of actual population...therefore, let us first assume that each population unit is equivalent (ie 11 population represents precisely 10% more people than 10 population)...in order to maintain a fixed absolute growth rate, you would have to have a decreasing percentage growth rate...

In another words, if you keep adding 1 population every 10s independent of how many people you have, your percent growth rate must be decreasing with time...this somewhat resembles a logistic population model, which also conveniently explains the sharp population cap on each planet (something an exponential model cannot easily do without additional caveats)...in fact, for a decent portion of its relevant domain, a logistic curve actually is approximately linear...

So, I would argue that the most realistic interpretation of Sin's population mechanics is that it tries to approximate a logistic population model and represents actual population with a linearly (not logarithmic) related population value...

How do asteroids have 500 or so million people? Well, judging by the size of the asteroids that are actually colonized (which are comparable to the size of a moon), I really don't think this is problematic given the apparent technology of the Sins universe...the largest asteroid in our solar system has a radius of 952 km (compared to earth's radius of 6,378 km)...this results in a surface area 1/45th that of the Earth...I'll admit it is a little strange for an asteroid to have a population density 2-3 times greater than a terran planet, but one could come up with socioeconomic reasons to explain that...

I would thik so too, maybe the little floating building is just part of the society, the asteroids to seem 1/2 the size of normal planets. I think that most asteroid inhabitants live underground, like the polis massa asteroid, many lived underground like the polis massa base, except much bigger. So its not that people would be living on the asteroid, they would live IN the asteroid. You know?