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ST: New Horizons Pop Realism

Submod for Star Trek: New Horizons

Short Description:
Small colonies of 1 Pop take about 4 times longer to get a new Pop.
Large colonies of 25 Pops take about 2 times as long as before to get a new Pop.*

IT IS NOW SAVEGAME COMPATIBLE!

The Basic Problem
11 Humans can become 160 Pops in just 50 years. One Novan Pop grew from one Pop into 14 Pops within 50 years, without a single Novan Pop 'created' by a colony ship. My calculations show: Every women had to have 8 surviving [!!!] children - and all had to be born before the age of 30. Not realistic in an utopian Star Trek society. Not even for a medieval society. Population growth for small colonies is way too high. After 100 years every planet on the map is filled with pops and population of my empire is in the thousands...

The faulty Game Mechanics...
Base Pop growth is one point per month. One Pop needs 25 points to grow. Ignoring other modifiers - as food surplus and habitability - you get the second Pop in your colony after just about 2 years. A doubling in 2 years - all women must have been pregnant... Totally contrary to real world the absolute growth goes dramticly down when the colony gets bigger. Every existing Pop in the colony adds another 5 points needed to create a new Pop. At 7 Pops the colony already needs more than 6 years for a new Pop. At 20 Pops about 8 to 10 years.

Consequence: If you want fast population growth, you need lots of very small colonies. If you want to beat the AI on higer difficulty, there is no other way to win. You have to spam colonies everywhere. Migration from your homeworld or your already grown colonies has little influence, as the population of your large colonies grows much slower than in any single small colony.

Stellaris tries to disencourage the resulting colony spam with growing costs for traditions and technology, but that's simply not enough.

My Fix:
The basic points to grow a new Pop have been increased to 100 (from 25 in basic ST:NH) for every Species. Small Colonies have their Population no longer breed like rabbits.

Results:
- Population grows slower, especially at the beginnging in small colonies
- Very small colonies now take much longer to grow (~8 years per Pop instead of ~ 2 years).
- Big ones (About 25 Pops) will grow slower as well now. (~14 years per Pop instead of ~8 years)*
- Having lots of small colonies does not create an population boom anymore.
- Borg and the Dominion now usually become dominating Powers, Cravic and Pralor sometimes (as they built, clone or assimilate their Pops they are not slowed down by the mod)

*The more complex update, that let large colonies grow faster than small ones had some unwanted side effects. The AI Empires did not build colony ships anymore - I could not find the reason. Therefore I had to upload the older version again. The good thing is that the new version is save game compatible to the original ST:NH.