Declining Pop Growth
Declining Pop Growth
Declining pop growth is a simple mod designed to reduce late game pop growth and therefore lag and micro. In vanilla, absolute pop growth only ever goes up for a competently-managed empire, as you constantly add new planets and growth boosts. This is fine for the early and mid game, but by the end game, more pops are essentially pointless (there is no difference in gameplay between an empire with 4k pop and one with 20k; both are post-scarcity and well in to repeatable techs, the second one just has bigger numbers) and yet you grow them faster then ever. This mod fixes that by adding an event that reduces a colony’s pop growth and assembly speed by 5% each decade (additive with most growth modifiers) since colonization. The result is roughly logarithmic population over the course of the game galaxy-wide; starting low, increasingly dramatically in the midgame as new colonies are settled, and then reaching a near-equilibrium in the endgame as older colonies begin to stop growing. If you don’t keep colonizing late game, eventually pop growth will stop completely, but you’d have to play a long time (200 years after your last colonization) for that; in practice it will just slow down a lot. This effect caps at -100% pop growth and assembly; additive growth and assembly buffs such as The Flesh is Weak or Fast Breeders will let your planets keep growing once that is reached, albeit slowly.
May be redundant come 2.9, but unlike 2.9’s slowed late game pop growth, which is tied to total empire population and thus invites cheese like spinning off vassals and reintegrating them, this mod’s effect is constant.
Compatibility: No vanilla files were harmed in the making of this mod.
