So something I've realized for a long time is I don't really understand how pop growth works. You get these massive % bonuses to growth through various means....but then the top number is something like .70% growth. So how do the growth bonuses translate into the percentage?
You start with the current total population number in the colony. You can see that value if you click on the pop icon, the one with the number of pops, beneath the morale icon. In your case, I imagine you have 5 billion something population (1 POP is abstracted to 1 billion). The base race modifier for population gained each turn is 0.5% of that. That's the default. Some races have a bigger number, others less. 0.5% of the current population translates to +27.99 million people in the next turn. Pop pressure applies a negative modifier of -0.25% over the 5 billion something for less 7 million. That gives you a total of +20.99 from natural population growth (the orange number). Then, you apply the population growth modifiers on top of that (the blue value), which totals +90% applied to the 20.99 million, for +18.89 extra, giving you a grand total of +39.87 million people gained that turn which translates to +0.71% of the current amount of population (in green).
Ok so in laymen's terms: Pop Growth is roughly .05% of your current pop. All pop growth modifiers apply to this number (so 90% is not 90% pop growth, its a 90% increase to your base growth). So if I'm reading that correctly, than that means if you don't have any special growth modifiers (and are not near your pop cap). It should take 20 turns to grow from 1 to 2 pop, 10 turns to grow from 2 to 3, 5 turns from 4 to 5, etc. This is different than my experience, but perhaps the pop cap modifier is much stronger than I thought.
There are several things wrong here, first the numbers. If 26.98 is 0.5%, then population isn't 5 billion, it's actually 5.6 billion already. So, 60% of the progress between 5 POP and 6 POP is already done, and the POP GROWTH BASE already reflects that, while nothing else does. If 26.98 equals 0.5%, 0.25% can't be 7. The answer is simple: It's not 0.25% of POP, it's actually 25% of (pop growth) FROM RACE BASE. All the other numbers make sense since they are relative to the 20.99 FROM RACE POP GROWTH So, the 2 changes I suggest to fix this popup window Add info about pop growth progess, or just make the first line say "POPULATION 5.60". It's still kind of weird that pop growth scales with fractions of population, while production only increases once the billion is complete. I understand though, and you can leave it like that, I'd still want the UI to tell me what's going on. Fix FROM POP PRESSURE. It's 25% of FROM RACE POP GROWTH, not 0.25% of POPULATION. Which also means you should probably add another level of indentation for that line to reflect that. Also I'm missing any info on how that number is calculated. I have to admit I actually still can't figure out the formula for that.
No problem. So no pop growth progress bar? Also I finally figured out pop pressure formula. Until half full, it's 0%. Then it's (pop - max/2)/(max/2). Took me way too long, would have loved if the game itself told me that.
Thank you. edit: Ships and nuildings have a progress bar, terraforming and ecology upgrades do too, but pop and infrastructure don't, and I find that a bit weird. Nothing gamebreaking though.
Do some races have different numbers? The racial modifiers seem to be applied with all the other modifiers in the next section.
Actually, the race base value is always +0.5%. Then, the pop growth modifiers act on that (in the next section of the pop growth tooltip), which includes the race's pop growth modifier (e.g. Draguul have +25% pop growth).
