[dogscoff]

IMHO the best solution would be to have all planets with zero (or very small) population capacity by default, and a higher number of facility slots. When you colonise it, the coloniser-ship turns into a population facility, which will house (say) 150 million ppl. To acheive higher potential population levels, you have to build more population facilities .

Since your population is taking up facility slots, you'd have to balance your population growth requirements against your production requirements for each planet:
You could choose a small population and a large number of production facilities, or you could invest the time and facilities required to build up a bigger population and benefit from the resulting bonuses, which would outperform the other strategy in the long run.

Planets where you can't breathe the atmosphere would have the same number of facility slots as equivalent-sized breathable planets, but the domed population facilities would hold much less population than the undomed ones. When the time comes to replace the domed population with a native-breathing one, you'd have to scrap all the domes to gain the extra facility slots.

For domed planets to be balanced against undomed ones, the "minimum population to operate facility" setting would have to be activated. Otherwise you could just build one small dome and fifty research facilities on a huge unbreathable planet, and there would be no real difference between domed and undomed worlds.

A cool added feature would be if the game could track maximum native-breather population and maximum domed population seperately for each planet. That way, you could build a dome on your homeworld (at the expense of a facility slot) to accomodate a limited number of aliens. It really winds me up the way that one million non-breathers on my homeworld of 8 billion can force the entire planet to be domed.

For micromanagment freaks, you could even track each atmosphere seperately, and force the player to build a dome for methane, another dome for hydrogen... all on the same planet. But I think that would be taking it too far.

Researching the right tech levels would of course result in higher-density population facilities and domes.

IMHO this would be an elegant and logical approach to population which would add an interesting layer of management and control to the game. Of course it's unlikely to happen before SE5...

EDIT: Just remembered another benefit of this model- when a planet is under attack, damage to the population would be much more realistic, with one (un)lucky hit to a dome or population centre wiping out huge numbers at once.

[ July 04, 2002, 11:39: Message edited by: dogscoff ]