How to manage huge amount of population?

Hi Neron,

Well it depends on a lot of factors including planets, food output, science research and race.

(When dealing with underpopulation)

-Research and produce food generating system improvements via the upper half of the Empire development (leftmost) research tree, then backing their production once researched. (Needless to say, if you are still struggling with food after that, you can colonise planets that generate food, and as your population grows you can devote them to working those planets for more food, spurring exponential growth) 

-There are also planet specialisations you can enable which generate food (though admittedly better on some planets over others) which again is unlocked via the research tree.

(When dealing with overpopulation)

[Race specific]

For example, races that I like to play which can counter excessive population growth where necessary are the Riftborn, Hissho and Cravers.

-Riftborn doesn't use food, they create their population manually in their production queue and so you can decide when to add them and avoid overpopulation easily and if you accidentally generate too many, you can look at the ultimate way of controlling overpopulation at the bottom of this post.

-The cravers have their own ability to... turn their own population into "food" in reality you aren't making food you are converting population to happiness and so you are able to effectively control population this way.

-Hissho, similarly to the Cravers can convert their population to dust and kei via blood sacrifices where you turn population into resources, kei is the Hissho's "happiness" stat.

[Non race specific, ultimate means of population control (IMO)]

-Chain gangs. Chain gangs is a military tech that all races have access to (fairly early in the game as well), once you get it, (per time you add it to production queue) it converts 1 population to an amount of manpower (i can't remember the exact amount [maybe 300]) but I'm fairly sure you can repeatedly do this even if your manpower is already at your maximum which means you can effectively control overpopulation with any race, while manpower isn't useful thing in the world for some races, it prevents overpopulation losses.

(correction the game has since been patched so that you can't use chaingangs at max manpower, but if you are always using manpower, say to fill fleets for groundinvasions against pirates or filling new ships (the larger the better) then you'll be able to use the tech.)

I personally believe that mods are uneeded in order to regulate the population as there are always options when it comes to population control, its just a matter of finding them and utilising them.

Hope this helps,

-Pyrocite

Depends on what exactly you mean. Overpopulated planets? Overcolonized empires? Micro management for pops/races within/across systems?

For the first two either reluctance to build too much food enhancements / colonization or beelining to the approval techs. Systems with plenty of early game resources or chokepoints get priorty of course.

In the latter case i personally go through my system about every ten turns to see if i should shift them within the system or move some to other systems.