Official News page 5

AN EXPLANATION OF POPULATION CALCULATIONS

by Hazed

Once the various bugs in the economic migration of workthings were fixed, players were still a bit confused about the numbers they ended up with, so Bella provided the following explanation:

So how does it work?

The first thing to note is that all calculations are done on the base population. To give an example, let's assume that Rigel 4 has a base population of 1,000 (that's what you start out with), and the only bonus is one for having five anti-grav builds - i.e. 5%. Five percent of 1,000 is 50:

di population
Population of Rigel 4 at last reset:
 Base Population 1,000
 AntiGrav +50
 -------------------------
 Net Population +1,050
 -------------------------

OK, so now Rigel 4 transfers out 500 workers. That means that its base population is now 500 workers. It still has a bonus of 5% for its anti-grav builds, but this time it's 5% of 500, not 1,000, which comes to 25, for a total population of 525, not the 550 that you might have otherwise thought!

di population
Population of Rigel 4 at last reset:
 Base Population 500
 AntiGrav +25
 -------------------------
 Net Population +525
 -------------------------

So, I hear you ask, what happened to my missing 25 workers? To see where they are we need to go back to our starting point. Here it is:

di population
Population of Rigel 4 at last reset:
 Base Population 1,000
 AntiGrav +50
 -------------------------
 Net Population +1050
 -------------------------

This time though we are going to transfer 500 workers into Rigel 4. That means we will have a base population of 1,500 and still have a 5% bonus. But 5% of 1,500 is 75 workers, so this time we gain an extra 25 workers instead of losing them!

di population
Population of Rigel 4 at last reset:
 Base Population 1500
 AntiGrav +75
 -------------------------
 Net Population +1575
 -------------------------

The effect of removing workers from a planet with a negative bonus and adding them to a planet with a positive bonus is left as an exercise to the students :)

Incidentally, you can't reduce the workforce on a planet to less than 100...

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