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Whenever you encounter a new species your population policy on every planet defaults to "assimilate" for that species, even though it is likely you don't what whoever it is on most if not all of your planets. So, if you have multiple races on multiple types of planets you have to go to every single colony and change from "assimilate" to "do not allow", which gets pretty tedious if you have more than a handful of colonies. Devs, would it be possible to switch this so it defaults to "do not allow", so you only have to change the few planets where you do want them, resulting in far less time wasted, please and thank you? Or maybe have a policy setting to pick which way to go for new encounters?

Why would I not want them?
As long as they stay the minority, they won't hurt the planets performance at all. And they can be the seed to colonize whole new biome types.

My understanding is that any population not suited to the environment (not at least +20) lowers happiness and maximum overall pop, in other words effectively lowers the value of the planet compared to all pop at +20 or higher. Also don't you need 500 million of a race at a location before you can load that race into a colony ship? Volcano bugs on a continental planet probably can't reach that at max pop. Am I remembering wrong on these point?

randal7 wrote: Thu Mar 09, 2023 11:05 pm My understanding is that any population not suited to the environment (not at least +20) lowers happiness and maximum overall pop [...]

Not quite.

Only the dominant Population is used for Suitability and Happiness calculations.
Each Population does have their own personal maximum population, derived from personal suitability. But the planets total maximum population will thus be defined only by the most suitable (which also has a good shot at being the dominant, being able to go where others can not).

zgrssd wrote: Thu Mar 09, 2023 11:15 pm Only the dominant Population is used for Suitability and Happiness calculations.

This is unfortunate - seems each population should have it's own happiness, which is averaged up to the total.

AKicebear wrote: Fri Mar 10, 2023 12:29 am

zgrssd wrote: Thu Mar 09, 2023 11:15 pm Only the dominant Population is used for Suitability and Happiness calculations.

This is unfortunate - seems each population should have it's own happiness, which is averaged up to the total.

That would just force you to micromanage towards single species planets. It does not sound like a fun thing.

All we need right now is a population with good Suitability as the primary.

zgrssd wrote: Fri Mar 10, 2023 12:36 am

AKicebear wrote: Fri Mar 10, 2023 12:29 am

zgrssd wrote: Thu Mar 09, 2023 11:15 pm Only the dominant Population is used for Suitability and Happiness calculations.

This is unfortunate - seems each population should have it's own happiness, which is averaged up to the total.

That would just force you to micromanage towards single species planets. It does not sound like a fun thing.

All we need right now is a population with good Suitability as the primary.

Or, there could be broader policy settings of what to do with unhappy population, so you don't have to micro manage but the game has nuance which may lead to interesting emergent situations.

AKicebear wrote: Fri Mar 10, 2023 3:22 am

zgrssd wrote: Fri Mar 10, 2023 12:36 am

AKicebear wrote: Fri Mar 10, 2023 12:29 am

This is unfortunate - seems each population should have it's own happiness, which is averaged up to the total.

That would just force you to micromanage towards single species planets. It does not sound like a fun thing.

All we need right now is a population with good Suitability as the primary.

Or, there could be broader policy settings of what to do with unhappy population, so you don't have to micro manage but the game has nuance which may lead to interesting emergent situations.

I do not feel like such mechanics and policies would add anything to the game.

The current system is workable enough. I occassionally have the impulse to throw out some population to make sure some other population becomes the primary - that is about it.