The Shattered Star

I am losing an average of 50 citizens per day, and I have no idea why.

Anyone have any clue as to why this might be happening?

I just looked and I lost people too. Not sure how many I lost, but I no longer have enough to support my current improvements.

Could be the rise in Global Radiation, it's 0.83 now and it's been rising for a couple of days. A couple of days ago it was below 0.7

I don't think it is radiation. I looked into it a bit and environment affectes population. It was never stated that it could cause a population loss, but it is supposed to affect population. Also, I had never taken government positions. After I went through and selected various positions my population climbed by almost 500 citizens. Clearly, position does affect population.

However, I still don't know why I was losing citizens.

Yeah global radiation has risen a little.

Since global radiation ignores any environment modifiers it will knock off some pop.

So global radiation will kill off population? Is there a limit? Do the losses stabilize at some point?

And since it is global, is it happening to everyone else?

And can anyone confirm that government positions affect population? Actually, it looks like they might affect environment which affects population.

This seems to happen now and then, I have no idea why.

Radiation seems as likely as anything. It levels off after a while for me when it happens.

Radiation is capped at 5.0 at the moment and it has a direct affect on a nations environment. Your environment rating affects both population size and happiness.

The environment rating is pretty complex and is affected by the following:

• Imported coal, oil, and uranium resources
  Radiation cleanup bonus resource
  Tech level
  Infrastructure to land ratio
  Military to population ratio
  Access to water
  Government type (+ for Capitalist, Democracy, and Republic. - for Anarchy, Communist, Dictatorship, and Transitional)
  Responses to the drug and immigration government policy questions
  Owning nuclear weapons
  Wonders

Population is also very complex as it's affected by environment, resources, govt. position, improvements, wonders, etc.

Vince specific advice is hard to give because I can't run the numbers for every alternative but changing from Monarchy to Democracy could boost environment at the cost of the 5% discount in infra purchase, or to Republic for the cost of 1 point in happiness.

A useful tip for everyone, increase land to greater that 50% of your infrastructure for +1 to environment.

Hope that helps.

Zeph.

Having the land to infra ratio isnt worth the +1. Spending that money on infra instead of land gives you a lot more than the bonus does.

Well, Zeph, I honestly expected a more thorough analysis, but if that is the best you can do ......



I actually did make some changes in my government policy recently. I will have to watch my environmental rating, a factor I have primarily ignored, a bit more closely.

Like I said, I'm not running the exact numbers for every nation to see if it benefits you.

But in some circumstance it is good to get land.

It really depends on individual circumstance, how much the land you need and how much it would cost vs how much infra you could buy for that money and how much the bad environment is hurting you.

Remember the bad environment is not just reducing your population, it is reducing happiness as well. So you not only have less citizens paying tax, each citizen you do have is paying less in tax.

You really need to run the calculations for your individual circumstances to see the cost vs benefit, and calculate the potential return on investment.

Zeph

@Messiah

Funny guy

I told you before I can't help it if I'm a geeky computer scientist that has to figure out just how these things work.

Even though I am a geeky computer scientist, I'm not going to do the calculations for every nation and besides some of the numbers are actually unknown so calculating some things exactly is pretty hard to do.

One of these days maybe I'll write a calculator that you can feed your stats into and do some what if scenarios. I'm kinda half way there anyway as I do know a lot of the modifiers and things.

@Isileth

Land may seem unimportant now, but keeping it at half infrastructure will be useful down the road. I know from my exploits in the Tournament Edition that land has a significant impact on military defense. And the environment +1 is a rather significant boost to overall population and population happiness, both of which directly affect gov. income from taxes.

I adjusted my government poisitions, purchased enough infrastructure to replace the lost citizens, and seem to have stabilized. I did not have a population loss today. My environment is very good right now with 5 stars.

While it is a nice bonus I saw the math on it in the forums. Its not even close. The infra means more pop, higher taxes, bigger military.


Plus for the time you are under 1k land you don't have any costs of a navy and don't risk that extra attack against you.



The problem is land increases in cost exactly the same way infra does, and it becomes extremely expensive to maintain a small bonus (compared to what you get from infra).

Zephir wrote:Radiation is capped at 5.0 at the moment and it has a direct affect on a nations environment. Your environment rating affects both population size and happiness.

It most certainly is not capped at 5.0. On the face it is, but it can reach upwards of 16+ (last war it made it to the fancy Sanction race, I believe it was at 20 something at that time). As you said, radiation is linked to the environment, which is linked to Happiness and population. If your environment is low, your population will start to decrease as will the population happiness. The GRL is the one thing that is impossible to control or find a way around. Just sit back and wait for it to get lower.

According to the devs although the actual figure for global radiation is not capped, only the first 5 points count in calculations.. So if the GRL is above 5, the environment calculations treat it as 5.

Yeah its effect is capped at 5, but it can go a lot higher as it did during our little slaughter.