Increasing pop in a colony

[Velihopea]

Some newbie help needed. I'm playing DW without expansions.

What are the ways to increase population in a colony? The population of a new colony starts at 12M and grows painfully slow.

[Data]

From the galactopedia

"Population growth
Small colonies have faster population growth: when a colony has less than 500 million people, then population growth receives a 50% bonus.

Migration of your citizens from large colonies to smaller ones is a major factor in achieving fast growth of new colonies. Citizens will be naturally attracted to nearby colonies with low taxes and good development levels. They will board passenger ships and migrate to those new colonies, boosting the population there.

Some areas of colonization research can also accelerate population growth at particular planet types.

Colony populations eventually reach a natural limit, at which point no further population growth will occur. This limit is determined by two factors:

· Quality of world: more hospitable worlds with higher quality allow for higher maximum population levels

· Size of world: larger worlds allow for higher maximum population levels

· Native planet type: if the type of the planet or moon is the native type for the race living there, then the maximum population is 10% higher"

In practical terms, keeping taxes to 0 does wonders; and high development is always a boner...I mean bonus.

[Velihopea]

So there is practically no means to manually send people?

Lowering taxes and building recreation bases (or what was it named) are the only ways to accelerate growth?

[Ralzakark]

Things have been added in the expansions such as colony govenors, so it's a recognised weaknes of the original game.

Ensure that you have efficient passenger ships as well, as they are the only means of adding colonists from off-world after the initial colonisation.

[Bebop Cola]

I'm not sure I'd say it was a "weakness" of the original game, per se. Many 4x games give players a comparative luxury of using what essentially amounts to forced relocation of private citizens to a new colony. DW simply says you have to find a way to encourage your population to do it on their own. Both as a micro-management reduction and a function of the state-private sector divide, this sort of makes sense. Building a state-sector population transport and filling it with population is effectively forcing those citizens to leave homes, family, friends, and jobs to live in on some backwater frontier world against their wishes.

That said, it would make sense for certain government types to be able to use forced relocation at the expense of happiness. A mild hit to happiness at the origin for every passenger ship to take people away and a large happiness hit at the destination as the new colonists are offloaded to represent their resentment.

[Velihopea]

Absolutely agree. DW's greatest strength is in its realism compared to other space 4x games (for me atleast). I was just wondering if I'm doing something wrong with colonization: And it turns out I did. Checked that there was NO passenger ships in my empire. As I hadn't designed them, the private industry hadn't built them... Time for a new game I quess.

Bebop's suggestion of forced transportation sounds good. Some despotic empires should be able to do it. For democracies it just wouldn't sound right

[MisterBenn]

Also have a look at your race's preferred resources. Some of these grant global bonuses to colony growth or other things like development level or happiness which will help the process along.

[ASHBERY76]

Why do people seem to ignore the galactopedia.

[Beag]

Guess one of the reasons why population growth is so slow is also due to how it influences research capacity. It´s a pretty good reason to get independant colonies ASAP, specially if it´s a smart race.