1.9.5.4 Population commits instant mass suicide when I increase tax rate

[Chris McMahon]

So my homeworld is a Q100 Planet. I built a lot of wonders on it (development level 175) and dropped the tax rate to 0. I wanted to know what the best-case max population of the planet was.

After about 15 years of a 30% growth rate, I finally hit max population ~35billion. Great, now I can finally make some profit from this money sink! So I increase the tax rate from 0 to 65%. According to the happiness rating (+20), I could have increased it further, but I like to keep my colonies at +20. I unpause the game (to 1x speed). Instantly my population drops to 25 billion. Instantly!

Did they load onto passenger transport ships? No, there were none in orbit, plus that would take a LOT of transports. I can only surmise that when confronted with a 65% tax rate for the first time, ~10 billion colonists lost their shit and decided that suicide was the only viable course of action.

WTF?

[Erik Rutins]

Do you have a save file for this that you could upload?

[Chris McMahon]

ORIGINAL: Erik Rutins

Do you have a save file for this that you could upload?

Only one from 30 minutes or so after it happened. Any use?

[Chris McMahon]

Ok, I found a save approx 10 minutes before the issue and replayed up until the maxing out of the population.

Most probably, the bug was the high initial population. When I reloaded the game, this time the population maxed out at ~28 billion. Then I applied the 65% rate rate and it only dropped down to 27.6 billion.

So I'd say that when the game removed ~10 billion from the colony, it was just "fixing" whatever allowed the population to exceed the normal max for the planet.

[Bingeling]

Did it have a disaster happen that reduced quality? I assume it was not bombarded.

[Chris McMahon]

No disaster or bombardment. This was my home world. Both before and after, the planet quality was 100.