Large colony population seems counterproductive in Crusade

Population seems a little undervalued to me as well. I thought something like square root of population x2 might be a little better. So you would have 4 pop = 4 raw production, 9 pop = 6 raw production, 16 pop = 8 raw production, 25 pop = 10 raw production, so on and so forth. As it is currently, your population is trivial in contributing to production compared to asteroids, which just seems a little off to me. It won't bother me if they just keep the system the way it is now, but I think my method would be a little bit better. I definitely do NOT want them to go back to the old 1 population = 1 raw production system, I think that over values population.

One thing to keep in mind though is that population does seem to effect your influence in the United Planets. I currently play a custom synthetic race, which is easy to build large populations with because they are not hindered by morale penalties. I have noticed that my voting power in the U.P. is huge compared to when I play with a race that doesn't have large populations. So if you have two empires that are equal in all else, the one with the bigger population has more pull in the U.P. So there are benefits to having a large population count besides just raw planetary production.

Hope you have a great day!

You aren't wrong - for most races, spending the tiles to increase population is the wrong strategy. The only way I've seen it be even slightly efficient is combining some form of integer morale building with a large % increase. The easiest I know of is entertainment centers + intimidation centers (malevolent). The ICs give 20% morale + 50% per bonus level. One or two adjacent ECs or planetary tile bonuses will allow populations above 30.

That said, the population still probably isn't worth it compared to pure improvements. Going from 4 to 36 pop only results in +4 production and possibly some city adjacency bonuses. The entire time you are building morale and city improvements, you aren't getting bonuses from standard construction/research buildings. It'd probably take 100s of turns to pay back that opportunity cost.

Play a synthetic race with xenophobic slavers for population to be worth it and easy to increase. 

I hope this gets rebalanced. Population should be way more important than asteroids.

There is a mod in the forums that changes the exponent on pop from .5 to .75 which gives a big bump to production

The problem with that is the game needs to be rebalanced for the increased exponent. Among many issues, a straight raw production increase makes more buildings/tiles/research complete in one turn, reducing your effective production per turn. As a rough example: if my planets have 60 social construction and my enemy's have 50 but all starting buildings cost 50 or less, my higher production isn't giving me a head start. It's only giving me a boost to a later expensive project. That's just one example.

excess production and research is carried forward so you are not losing points

I took it on my plate to number-crunch all this.  At a base of 10 production, a -20% productivity hit due to morale will reduce you by 2, which nullifies what you get for having a 16 population instead of 4.  And you can't measure it as a straight -20%:  you have to measure from whatever positive morale modifier you would have had at 4 population vs. what you get at 13.  And since a city basically costs you three tiles (if you don't mod or cheat:  1 for city, 1 farm, 1 entertainment), it's not too hard to find better uses for those 3 tiles.

Meanwhile, synthetics don't give a rip about morale/approval, cities, farms and can spam factories and/or research buildings all day and max out population at 100. 

Stardock's plan     . Resistance is futile.

I like to play the stock game with no mods right now, but thanks for the heads-up! I'm hoping Stardock will gradually address balance and defects as more people play the game and report their issues.

Me too, the ^0.5 is too big of a "non-bonus", there should be some incentive (besides UP voting) for growing your population at the cost of those valuable tiles

I think the morale penalties should do all the work, and not the declining exponential power of the population.  

I'm a firm believer that as technology advances the benefit of population to create anything other than consumption and woe dwindles. I'm quite happy that population is counter productive... its actually kind of realistic that way.

Still I get the point that... why bother having cities and farms if its counter productive? and it could use a small boost, or other mechanic to justify it. 

Yes, they are, but those points aren't helping you get ahead on the current turn: the early colony ship, research tech, or wonder. 

Like most (it seems) here, I'm playing stock and hope Stardock implements a balance change in a future update.   

Anyone know population's effect on Tourism and or Wealth Generation?

One would THINK that higher pop would = higher Wealth... 

Pop effects wealth the same as it does research and construction,  do not know about tourism

Actually, it makes sense to me that influence, money, and tourism would scale linearly with population, but not production.  

I write this even as I'm vacationing domestically right now and am paying exorbitant resort taxes to my own government. 

I hope you at least got free internet access to post this reply!

If I was using Rogers, you would not be getting this reply.

What's a Rogers? 

Google is translating that as "a miscellaneous object, approximately a few grams in weight and a few centimetres in diamater, originating from a donkey's orifice".

My home has Rogers for broadband internet... gotta love the telecom monopoly   .

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I'm just glad Ver-spy-zon didn't make it across the border.

Economies scale far better than linearly with added population, because you get exponential possible transactions.  Thus, with 2 people, there's really only 1 transaction relationship possible. With 3 people, there's 3 possible transactions (A-B, B-C, C-A).  With 4, you get 6 (A-B, B-C, C-D, A-C, A-D, B-D). And so forth.  It's O(n^2).

Naturally, that's optimal, and never happens. But an economy does show far greater than linear scaling as relates to population.

Influence, on the other hand, depending on how we define what is going on with that metric, doesn't have to scale with population at all.

 And Tourism similarly doesn't depend much on population - indeed, it seems to be more related to land area than anything else I can find, though even that is shaky.

(I just realized this is ambiguous. I'm talking about real-life Earth, not the GC3 universe.)

It's tourism INCOME, and aliens probably have different ideas what constitute tourist spots.  Although in Hawaii we could probably work something out.  The Terrans get the beaches on Oahu and Kauai.  The Drengin get the big island, get to visit all the volcanoes.  Jump in every now and then.  Sacrifice the occasional virgin Drengin.