Ideal population

I don't know how the stats work out in TA, but in DA you should build 2 farms and no moral buildings. The reason being that the opportunity cost of missing that extra stock exchange is not compensated by the extra population you gain with the moral building. The population level off as moral comes down anyway.

This way you do maximise income, and you get a high population (which is good for score) however, you do run at a fairly low moral. No problem though, just keep an eye on elections and drop the tax for that week only, voters, true to form, have a short memory.

With this approach you want to try and bag all the moral techs and moral trade goods you can. For some reason AI don't rate trade goods much so you can buy back any you miss.

For DL I'm finding 13 is my favoured population. Before then it had been 20bn, but then I realised I could drop my pop to 13, and convert the farm and morale buildings into stock exchanges, along with being able to maintain a tax rate of 80%, helping to maximise my income. Going on the data on the wiki page (assuming it's not out of date) there wasn't really any benefit to increasing my population+morale at the cost of stock exchanges when focusing just on income, and while a larger pop means I can resist invasions better, it also takes much longer to gain (through pop growth) than a lower amount. I usually will build 1-2 morale buildings for my planets, although it depends on what race bonus I've got, whether I've gained all the trade goods, and whether there's a morale resource I can gain as to whether I go for less than 2 or not (going for 2 helps give me some leeway in having a high tax rate without needing all the moral techs first, as well as the benefit of allowing a recently attacked colony to recover quickly)
I'm slightly puzzled why there are such massive and sudden changes though, e.g. from 80% to 81% (my morale was at 100% at 80%, but at 1% at 81% for example), or from 20 bn to 20.1 bn (one of my first times playing through I went and got lots of farms, aiming to make lots of money from all my planets, and couldn't understand why my morale suddenly shot down from a comfortable ~60% to less than 40% until I started looking at my colonies and realised the only ones doing badly were over 20bn in pop).

In DL class 9 and above go to 20B. In DA Class 11 and above go to 20B. Anything lower either gets 13B or it's natural class limit, since I don't usually bus pop. around.

How do you keep 20B populations happy in DA, DA?

I have difficulty ensuring my 16B civ capital worlds are as happy as my other planets, even with the initial 40% morale...that -48% to approval is painful, particularly as it also factors in as an x0.52 factor to both racial and structure morale bonuses (on a planetary basis). Fortunately, the PQ11 (also known as PQ10+) bonus is immune to this effect. However, I'm honestly not sure if it should be. Though, I don't play on anything larger than medium lately, so maybe I'm just not getting "enough" morale resources.

On a completely different topic, given the option, I'd prefer an economic resource to a morale resource. They each give +39, making one morale resource about equal to a VRC (in DA), whereas 5 economic resources will give you about the equivalent of 8 stock markets-on each and every planet. Admittedly, you lose the 40% influence boost those markets would provide, but 5 morale resources + 8 stock markets on every planet vs 5 economic resources + 5 VRCs on every planet leaves you with 3 more tiles to use. If you want the influence that badly, you can drop down two cultural exchange centers per planet for a total 50% influence boost and come out ahead with a tile per planet to spare. Though, I'm sure most of us would just add more stock markets. This is also a bit of an extreme example, as you should really never need 5 VRCs, unless you're trying to build a 100B pop world in DL (since those don't go over so well in DA).

maudlin, assuming the wiki is accurate for tax approval values in DL (which I haven't played in some time), you're looking at -398 at 100% tax and -192 at 80% tax. For DA, this is -192 (or -196, I forget) and -123 respectively. Which, I think, is a big difference.

As far as tax goes, the wiki is actually incorrect for DA. It states the constant to be ~24 for DA, but then states it is 20, and makes a note about planets higher than a set pop. However, the constant in the tax formula for DA is 26, at least for v1.8. I'm not sure how this would affect your results at all, though, especially if you're still on DL.

I have to ask-is there a reason you haven't moved over to DA yet?

I'm not much on the numbers behind the game, I just play a lot of it by ear and adjust as necessary. At 20B and 79% taxes in DA I get 44% approval(I had to load up my game and look ). This is on a gigantic map so I have plenty of morale resources. There is a cap on morale in DA and the last few modules on my morale resources have had no effect whatsoever, so I've hit that cap. I just make sure to keep an eye out for upcoming elections and lower taxes right beforehand.
Edit: I totally forgot to mention this is with two VRCs on a planet.

Of course in DL it is quite easy to hold that pop, thus the reason I do it down to class nine there. They can handle it without the 10%morale bonus the higher class planets get.

I go back and forth playing both DL and DA, I find different aspects appealing in each. Even when TA comes out, I'll be probably playing all three .

I figure the most efficient numbers will always depend on a number of conditions;

- Quantity against quality. Happiness does pay-off long-term while a progressively lowering morale can outrun any attempt at sliders gambling.
- Tax spent is an asset, debt is a handicap even if it is NOT currently evident that the pattern would lead the overall outputs below fixed maintenance costs.
- It is better to have 12B maxed at paying taxes with relative high morale numbers than having between 5 to 8B (notice the 20B cap also) more which affect the global figures until BCs keep dropping straight into a dead-end loop within a matter of 25 turns or less.
- What is more valuable? A 200BC building (and its continual maintenance) or a supplemental 500M/1B population (happy & growing, btw) that actually gives off the 200BC+Cost+Local Advantages (expressed in re-turning inputs) MULTIPLIED each turn they remain alive and willing to pay taxes to the central government?
- Morale cannot be so tough to handle unless the average empire-wide value drops below about 40%. And, since 100% benefits growth. It adds up, long term.

That's the essential, to me. I may have missed a few more important details though. Or even, be completely off the hook in my arguments.

- Zyxpsilon

The cap on native morale (at 100%) is after depreciation by population. At 20B, you're looking at a -66 or a 0.34x factor, which leads to your morale still improving up until about 294% racial morale. Assuming you take at least a 10% morale racial pick, or have it naturally (and why not, at 1 point, it's SO CHEAP), that's -only- 5 morale resources, with all morale trade goods and all morale techs. On a gigantic map, I'd expect 4-8+, so I wouldn't be too surprised at you noticing that you hit the cap.

My apologies for bringing the numbers into it-I do tend to play by instinct most of the time, but I'm a sucker for efficiency, and math is my second language.

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The problem I have with running at 41% approval (or 21% approval, as the case may be), other than it just feeling wrong, is that I feel that I can't pump out transports fast enough-or rather, fill them-without drastically lowering taxes to get to the 2x growth bonus.

It seems I always feel pop growth is too slow, though. In the beginning, I make do with my 164M/turn (thank you, Universalists!), but it still feels painfully slow. As a note, one would need 12 fertility clinics on a planet (every planet, actually...) to match the Super Breeder ability's growth-and you'd still have to be at 100% approval to do it! At 41% approval you'd need a sickening 28 fertility clinics to pull that kind of growth off-but the Torians aren't growing that fast at 41%, either.

One other point that seems to be neglected, though not necessarily forgotten, is that population really has no effect on pop growth, except when it's below 2.5B. As long as your world is (comfortably) above 2.5B, so base growth = 75M, it can be a 6B world or a 100B world, and the pop growth will be the same. (Well, not a 100B world, because then it won't grow, but you get the idea.)

Ideally, I'd have my worlds be in the ~80-90% approval range full-time, that way after I launch the first transport or two from them, they start growing with the 100% approval 2x growth rate. Arguably, 13B worlds would work as well, or in fact better, than 11B worlds. Maybe that would be a good endgame/cleanup phase goal, but I like having a plan that doesn't require adv farms. I am curious what effect the lower pop would have on influence and tourism, though. I may have to run a test game solely for that purpose.

I've been thinking about this kind of strategy due to the loss in taxes I take when I drop from say 79% to 49% or, God forbid, 39% to pick up my 2x growth bonus to grow troops. Even with the 50% that Aphrodisiac provides (I could have sworn it was 25% in DA, but it appears to be 50%), 20% from techs, and 10% from Universalists, this gives me a max growth of 270M pop/turn before factoring in fertility centers, which I usually don't even bother to build. I might consider building one per planet (or one per transport planet), as that would raise me by 68M to ~338M, but that's still amazingly slow when you're loading a transport with 2, 3, or even 6B troops.

This might also be important for score, as economy seems to have more of a bearing on it than population, as well as the idea that it's the area under the curve that matters. I would imagine bumps up and down wouldn't be helpful, but I honestly have no numbers to back that up at this point in time, and score isn't my primary focus, either.

As far as using customization points on pop growth, I rarely if ever take them, as I find more important things (for me) to spend them on. Given that Aphrodisiac is still (or again, as the case may be) a 50% growth bonus, this means the 40% from racial customization yields a max of only 120% as opposed to 80% without (130% to 90% if playing with an innate pop growth bonus-Hi Torians!), which gives us 2.2x to 1.8x or 22% more growth. While helpful, this is not enough of an improvement to justify it to me, though your mileage may vary.

Of course, the alternative is to just play Super Breeder. But I'm not ready to leave my Thalans just yet.

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Wow, I type a lot.

Zyxpsilon, I think the point I'm trying to make in regards to that is I prefer to have a plan for my empire's morale, so I don't wind up in situations where my pop is too high for my morale ability...or, and some would argue this is even worse, having a morale ability be "wasted" for many turns because I forgot to put down farms so pop could grow. After all, with 6B worlds, what's the point of a 300% native morale bonus? Nothing!

As for your first point, yes, I think we all notice that the first several turns...

I'm not sure what your point on the economic factor is. An extra billion people is NEVER (and I do mean never) going to give you an extra 200BC-per turn, anyway. I'm probably misreading that, though.

Hi!

Without using morale buildings it depends on how high you can push the Morale Ability (MA), and the PQ of a particular planet. The goal is to have about the same approval everywhere, to avoid losing pop on some planets when you change taxes to 80%, and have most of them at 100% when producing troop transports.

For MA about 100% (starting bonuses + all "wonders" + one resource) and PQ 11+ it's 13B (base colony + one farm), and 6B for lower planets.

Like others already pointed out, you need MA about 250% to go to 20B (base colony + two farms), and 13B on planets below PQ-11.

When you hit the 100% MA cap (DA feature), it's acutually pointless to push MA higher. To keep pop "happy" and push taxes higher, you need to build morale building(s) on planets. However each morale building takes away one Stock market (and 25% econ bonus), so it's rarely plausible to use more than one or two morale buildings even on your biggest planets. They will keep your pop more happy (good when producing trops), but at 80% taxes you'll get less money from them.

BR, Iztok

And to add to Iztok's great summary of the situation...

Things get a little more complicated in TA, for several reasons. Initial farms only offer 2 food, giving you a wider range of possibilities. Some races have buildings that offer 1 food. This gives you the ability, at least in theory, to more easily craft worlds with very specific population points.

Global Morale Ability (MA as Iztok abbreviates it) is still the ultimate variable you want to take into consideration. But within any MA range each race can have a slightly different approach. What government types do you have available? Play a race that can't get even a Republic form of government and you can afford a higher tax rate because you never have to worry about votes... and it generally takes a lot for your people to actually defect. Does your race have stock markets? What if your best econ building supplies only a +10% econ? In this case you can generally get more money by building morale buildings and farms for higher population... up to a point. Populations of 22billion and higher are still generally unworkable under every model. What if you have no econ buildings and no morale buildings? Do you have tech trading enabled to try and get some of these techs? If not, invade and hope you grab one, or spy and hope you steal technology. Or just work on pumping your MA.

Hope that helps,
~ Wyndstar

In TA it depends more on the race, some races can stand higher populations than others because of better morale technology, and disposition. Generally though with the exception of the Thalian home world I try never to go above about 20bil.

All things being relative, my "evaluation" was solely based on a compounded and progressively supplemental figure based on the fact that the INITIAL cost for morale buildings never will be refunded to your treasury, that their maintenance cost are always subtracted each turn and that the actual overall impact to a specific planet may very well fall into the negatives unless the growth (and level of population, as in additional factors, btw) can nullify the entire amount of expenses related to the specific building.
Thus, the rounded/average/theoretical 1B extra tax-payers which DO allow for positive balance and NOT if they aren't available.

Not to neglect also, is that whatever BCs are debited at turns-end for lack of a better word, in the RED treasury **Totals**... won't come back. The cash is gone/going and depletes the main economic resource until everything has to stop.

As a result, Morale has a cost to balance out with HIGHER population rather than less.

That's what i really meant.

- Zyxpsilon.

That fact has annoyed me for while now: You can run 40% morale and only lower taxes just before election, and the people vote as if you had been doing that the whole time. I'd like it better if morale had a kind of "inertia", that is, the factors influencing morale now should only determine the eventual morale, and the morale score should approach the asymptotic morale over time. In such an implementation, morale would actually matter for the purpose of losing elections.

Technically, you have to run 41% (minimum planetary, which puts your overall probably closer to 45%) if you want growth. But if you don't, you only need 21% (also minimum planetary, overall probably closer to 25%).

Nice idea, but I'm not sure how difficult it would be to implement, nor how newbie-friendly it would be. That's my main problem with any system that attempts to use "average morale", mostly because they tend to get too complicated.

Which brings me back to my idea.

While I'm aware that having elections every week isn't exactly realistic, colonizing a planet in a week isn't, either. This would also seem to open up another "type" of election. For most of the year, your elections determine whether you keep your political party bonuses. The other two weeks of the year (the two weeks we have elections in the current system) determine whether you keep the economic bonus your form of government provides. Though, I admit that might be taking it too far as well-I'd be perfectly happy with normal elections each and every week.

And if you don't want elections-just run as Imperial.

Hi!

It was not intended so. Quite some time ago Brad wrote this will not be possible, but obviously when they coded the game, they forgot to implement it.

BR, Iztok

Shame they still havn't implemented it. Losing the odd election would be fun.

I only bought DL, and wasn't sure if I could afford/justify the expenditure on DA. However a week or so ago I went ahead and bought DA, and after a few issues with stardock installation+patches etc. got it working, and having great fun atm. Thanks for the up to date figure on the tax constant - was reviewing my ideal pop figures for DA along with what sort of expenditure per planet I should be looking at to be sustainable and was finding it maddening that the wiki said tax was 20% lower in DA, or had a constant of 24, or had a constant of 20, all in the same section!

What I do is to calculate the break even point between the income loss from having to give up a certain number of tiles for food and approval versus the income gain from having a higher population. This is actually very easy to do using a simple equation in a spreadsheet and the same equation works for both DL and DA and I assume will work the same for TA as well.

Once I have knowledge of the income break even point than I will allow my population to rise on all planets that will give me an equal or better income at a higher pop.

The key is to come up with the number of tiles you need to give up to control your approval at a reasonable level at the desired population. This number of tiles will depend on what you consider reasonable approval levels, how many morale resources you control and the level of your morale ability. This will vary on the version of the game you're playing, the size of the game you're playing and just random differences from game to game.

Let's just take a random example and at the same time limit the problem by considering the two normal cases that you'll have for DL and DA.

In DL and DA the normal options are 13B and 20B. The first thing I do is to just consider PQ11+ planets as candidates for the higher pop value because they have the 10% approval bonus. This just makes life easier and all in all you could reasonably get the odd PQ9 or PQ10 up to 20B if it has a food and approval bonus but there are so few planets that are worthwhile in this category that you're best off ignoring them.

So OK you're only going to consider planets PQ11+, now what. The first thing you need to do is to figure out how many tiles you have to give up to have an acceptable approval at the 20B. The "normal" numbers for DL are 3 and 4 while for DA these are 4 and 5. Actually these are normal gigantic galaxy numbers. 3 is actually the number in DL presuming 6 or perhaps 5 morale resources to mine and all morale techs and wonders. Of course this number rises on smaller galaxies with fewer morale resources. In the case of DA the higher numbers I quoted basically presume the cap on the effectiveness of morale resource mining so smaller galaxies in DA don't hurt as much.

In tiny galaxies you may as well forget about all of this and simply limit yourself to 13B. However you could use the following analysis to decide between 6B and 13B in the case of smaller galaxies, however you will need to figure that out from the equations I give since the table at the end of all of this only applies to the 13B/20B choice.

This is based on the assumption that you need one extra tile for the farm and then you need the rest for VRC's. Take the basic case of 3 which is what I usually see in gigantic galaxy DL games where I get about 6 morale resources to mine. So what I'm saying is that to change a planet at 13B to 20B and keep its approval at "reasonable" levels I need an extra farm and two VRC's. If at 20B you determine you need an extra farm and 3 extra VRC's then the number is 4 and so on.

OK so I've established the number of tiles I need to give up to have a higher pop, now what. Well next you need to look at the income equations for DL and DA. These have been published in a couple of places. I think it was Iztok that derived these and Wyndstar may have been involved as well. Anyway the equations for DL and DA are similar but not identical due to differences in coefficients but you don't need to deal with the full equation. Basically in DA you use the DA equation to figure out the income from a pop with 13B and you use the same DA equation to figure out the income from a pop of 20B. Since what is important is the ratio of these two values a number of terms as well as the coefficients drop out of the equation.

The same is true for DL. You're determining the ratio of income at two different populations using the DL equation and in fact all the specific DL coefficients and terms drop out of the equation and you can use the same equation for both DL and DA. And unless they change the core of the equation for TA the same equation applies for TA as well.

Basically the "reduced" equation that applies for all versions of the game is only suitable to determine the ratio of the income at one pop to the income at another pop. It's not suitable for an absolute income calculation, for that you would need the full equations. By that I mean you can use the simple equation to determine if you will make more income on a particular planet at 13B than at 20B but it won't tell you what the income will be at either 13B or 20B just the ratio of the two incomes.

Anyway with all that established the equation is SQRT(POP)*(1+N*0.25) where POP is your 13B or 20B or actually any particular pop you wish to establish and N is the number of stockmarkets on the planet once all your approval and food tiles are taken out of consideration. This assumes that a stockmarket gives you a 25% income bonus. You can count economic capitals simply as two stockmarkets.

Before I get into more details there are a few more things to consider. Let's say you figure that to have acceptable approval at 20B versus 13B you need to give up 3 tiles. Your break even point requires that the 20B planet will have at least 9 stockmarkets on it. That's saying that the two following equations are about equal.

SQRT(13B)*(1+12*0.25) ; 13B with 12 stockmarkets
SQRT(20B)*(1+9*0.25) ; 20B with 9 stockmarkets

So for it to be economically worthwhile to let a planet go to 20B then you'll need 9 stockmarkets left on the planet at 20B. Clearly if you don't overbuild your planets to *all* stockmarkets in the late game then its going to be very hard to have that many stock markets. Also even if you do overbuild your planets with stockmarkets then 9 is still a pretty big number. Assuming a initial colony building along with the two total food tiles and two VRC's then that pretty much requires PQ14+ which is part of the reason I limited to PQ11+ in the first place. Of course bonus tiles reduce these requirements significantly. Also in DL you need to count actual tiles since they can vary significantly from the planets listed PQ. I've seen PQ11's with 16 tiles.

So any case it's easy enough to plop the above equations into excel and play around with the number of stockmarkets needed to justify the higher pop at the different number of tiles you may need to give up. Obviously the higher this number the more stockmarkets and hence higher PQ planet it will take to justify the higher pop. As an example if you need to give up 4 tiles to achieve the higher pop then the 9 stockmarkets becomes 13.

One more thing is important here and that is bonus tiles both food and approval. If you have a single food or approval bonus tile then that automatically reduces the number of tiles you need to give up from 3 to 2 and this changes a lot. Now instead of 9 stockmarkets on the 20B planet to break even you only need 5. That's a big difference. If you get a food *and* approval tile on a planet you suddenly only need to give up only one tile (assuming your initial number is 3) and that means you only need a single stockmarket left on the 20B planet in order to justify the higher pop.

I basically use this spreadsheet every game to determine what planets I leave at 13B and which I let rise to 20B.

To cut to the chase and just give out some numbers here's a table of how many stockmarkets need to be left on the high pop planet based on how many tiles you need to achieve that higher pop. I start with 1 due to the possibility of food/approval tiles. Note that this table only applies to the 13B/20B decision. For other pop values you'd have to go back to the ratios of "reduced" equations to determine the equivilient values.


Hope this helps someone.

Hi!

The current version of DA (1.8) has about 40% lower tax output as DL has. The output in DA was nerfed twice, first with original DA, then with ver. 1.61, each time by about 20%. But planets over 25B have the output even lower, the constant of 20 seems to be the right one for them.

BR, Iztok

Hi!

Definitely. Great work, Mumble!

BR, Iztok

In an effort to verify my initial claim that DA's constant is 26 rather than either the 24 or 20 the wiki specifies (and with no disrespect meant for the work you and others have put into it, on this or other specifics, Iztok), I am now finding that for different tax rates the constant appears to be different.

This is in 1.80g (not 1.80e, and it's not a fleet/movement bug either, but thanks), and I still have yet to do the mini update that was put up a few days ago to, in essence, test the servers, but due to that I doubt it has something that would resolve this.

It's very difficult to see in the first turn, with the limited population levels one has available, but it is possible. After landing my colony ship on my home world, to have my home world at 8.1B on the first turn, I ran some numbers.

A tax rate of 25% nets me 16bc playing as the Terrans (so no Xeno Economics) with (for reference) the War Party (so no economic bonuses) and no customization points spent in economics either, for a base economic rate with 0% bonuses. A tax rate of 24%, however, lowers this to 15bc. Assuming that truncation is taking place and that 16bc is the actual value for 25%, one would assume 50% to be 32bc. It is in fact 29bc, and bumping it to 51% raises it to 30bc. In addition, 100% taxes gives us 57bc, when based on our 25% figure, it should give us 64bc.

Given that tax rate is already factored into the tax formula, modifying the constant based on it seems unnecessary to me, and has me confused even more about taxes than I ever was.

Is anyone else seeing this?

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As a note-I tested with a different game having tax at drastically different levels while managing to keep approval at 100%. Approval does not appear to affect taxes, nor the constant, but for some reason tax rate is, in my experience, affecting the constant.