Is there a cure for the Population Blues?

[Slick]

One aspect of this great game that I do not enjoy is the management of population.

In the beginning of a game it is "only" a little boring to move your own population around to your expansion colonies. In this phase, the Population Minister can be of some use. Sure, he doesn't do a good job, but he does it. I limit his ability to do significant damage, at the cost of even more efficiency, by making Population Transports with only the minimum number of Cargo Bays, and only use Cargo Bay I's.

In the mid-to-late game, the problems get worse. As you get other races incorporated, you have to worry about putting them on the right planets. The Population Minister will totally mess this up and you can't really use him for this task so it is back to manual control. Even if you do some manual intervention, he is likely to mix populations on a planet which will "dome" the world and halt facility production if greater than the domed maximum. Also add in the need to exert more control to ensure happiness stays in check, using UPC's, troops, etc.

Another headache is if you have alien population on a planet with a spaceyard. You build a colonizer, but the green/red star planets still refer to your original population, not to the population on that planet. So that greenie may really be a red for the alien population on the particular planet. You have to make sure your colonizer picks up the right population for the right planet. Add in the frustration in simultaneous games of not being able to fine-tune the loading of population automatically using "Load" or "Colonize" i.e all or nothing. You have to waste another turn by having the colonizer stop at the planet you want to load from so that you can Transfer the right number of population to the Colonizer.

I know that I can change the "Natural Decrease for Other Races := 20" to a negative number to ease up on the happiness aspect, but I really don't want to do that because I want to play the game the way it was intended.

Can some of you share your population management techniques to help me with my Population Blues? How many Pop. Transports do you use? What is the configuration? How do you keep track of who-is-going-where? Etc. Any help would be appreciated.

Slick.