Hi all.

I am looking for some clarification about how the game manages population growth,and how it can be stopped in order to avoid further penalties.

Thanks !!

I can't give you much in the way of hard data, but here goes:

Everyone except Riftborn and Vodyani require 300 food to grow new population units (pop). Food builds up over time, and once the threshold is reached, it is consumed and a new pop is created. I'm not sure, but I think that an overabundance of food stacks up to a certain point, so if your stockpile + per turn yield reaches above 300, some will remain for the next turn.

Each pop consumes a certain amount of food every turn; this number might be modified by things like empire traits (Haroshem can grant a -10% food consumption bonus, for example). Food is also consumed to produce manpower, and this consumption can also be modified, for example by certain buildings in the Empire Development quadrant of the tech tree.

I'm assuming that the penalty you mention is overpopulation approval penalty, which triggers when your pop begins to fill the red-shaded population slots on planets. The most direct way to avoid these before reaching overpopulation in your systems is to reduce food production to net zero, or to a very small positive growth, through use of buildings that convert food to manpower and by intentionally reducing your food yield by selling food producing improvements.

If you haven't fully colonized the systems that are experiencing overpopulation penalties, you can send pops to relatively empty planets and colonize new planets to open up more room for growth, avoiding the overpopulation slots for as long as possible.

You can also send pops from overpopulated systems to colonies with small populations using the starport, which temporarily solves your problem and is a good way to take advantage of a high-growth system.

You can forcibly get rid of your population using actions such as Chain Gang Program to convert population into other yields - in this case, manpower. This does take up the system production qeue and probably isn't an effective long-term strategy to deal with your problem.

Finally, you can avoid the overpopulation approval penalty through straight bonuses to approval (easily done with laws or system improvements) or by integrating the N-P artifacts luxury in your system development (though last I heard it was an inefficient way to keep approval high). There might be other ways but I don't remember off the top of my head.

Counterintuitively, if you have populations that give a happiness yield such as Kalgeros or Z'vali, you can use luxury boosters on them to double their yields for 10 turns, though this also increases their likelyhood to grow. I've found that this can deal with approval problems very well, especially if you have high production of their desired luxury resource.

I hope this answered your question effectively.

Thanks, I am gonna try this ideas and see what happens now.