What good is population?

[Gurduloo]

Is population really that important? I have colonies with really pretty low populations that seem able to build plenty of facilities and build ships just as quickly as a thickly settled world. I usually don't bother building population transports because of this. I'm a relative newbie, having played only the demo until I got SEIV Gold recently. Am I missing something important here?

[Nebraskan]

In the settings.txt file is a line for amount of population to operate a facility. This used to be set at 50 in SE4 and in a mod I am using called Proportions from the Gold disk it is set to 100 to operate a facility. What it means is this, if you have 10 facilities and only 200 population the facilities do not operate at full capacity. More people more efficency.

[chewy027]

and when you reach certain levels of pop you get bonuses to production that makes you build faster, produce more resources, etc.

[Suicide Junkie]

In the PBW Version of P&N, spaceyard rate is directly proportional to population.
Double the pop, double the build rate.

This also means that a new colony takes 8 months to build even the cheapest facility, and full dyson spheres can build almost anything in one turn

In SE4 classic, the pop modifiers max out at a +40% to +50% range.

[Gurduloo]

Thanks everybody. Sounds like I'll notice population effects more if I use some mods. So in the standard game, a full dyson sphere would only get up to 50% production bonus for population? That seems kind of weird.

[capnq]

quote:

---

In the settings.txt file is a line for amount of population to operate a facility.

---

Has that actually been turned on in Gold? That setting never worked in 1.49.