Wilderness and Pop Growth

[OnyxAbussos]

So, I've been trying to get going with Wilderness, and I keep running into the same question every single time:

Does Pop Growth matter at all to Wilderness? Like I get the impression that they 100% don't care, since they just auto-fill jobs while only making one job slot per occupation to fill. Right?

So for Build purposes... Do any of the Traits related to growth rates affect anything? Or the Civics, like Gaia Seeders (or whatever it's called for Wilderness)?

I get that Rooted is like a free points Trait. Are the slow reproduction Traits also like that?

 

[OnyxAbussos]

Like it would make sense to have Pop Growth be meaningless to them, since you're playing a consciousness for whom each planet is one organism. I'm just unsure whether the Origin is totally built that way or whether I'm misunderstanding things (always a possibility).

 

[Red Death]

Biomass = pops. So more pop growth means more gain of biomass.

 

[OnyxAbussos]

Ohhhhhhhhh... Okay, now I get it.

 

[Abdulijubjub]

Whether or not you care about pop growth depends on whether you want to invest more building slots into Cradles, or just keep a hefty population around to take advantage of logistic growth.

Basically: if you keep a stockpile of ~2500 biomass per planet around, you can (roughly) treat it like having 2 free cradles per colony. And in that cause, you'd want pop growth. Though given that your biomass won't be evenly distributed, it probably won't work out that neatly.

 

[Zergor]

That's a thing I don't really like with wilderness : As pop = biomass you only want as much as you need to build. After that all pops are strictly negative :
They generate crime, can reduce stability if you have too many, cost food, generate sprawl.

Strangely the optimal thing to do is to sometimes rebuild random buildings just to cull biomass.

I feel that something that could be done would be to have at least a -100% sprawl modifier on pops and on crime so that culling extra pops is not as useful.. or better just have one pop generated for all jobs like virtuality does and have the other pops removed entirely and biomass just be generated at a fixed speed by planets (could be increased by increasing the capital building).

 

[Ohirra]

Strangely the optimal thing to do is to sometimes rebuild random buildings just to cull biomass.

Do Wilderness empires not have access to the 250 Unity decision to stop all growth on a planet?

 

[Zergor]

I missed it. Probably because I don't really think to used planetary decisions with the new UI (may be a me problem but I don't like how hidden it is). But in that case yeah that partially solves the problem.

 

[Carl_Bar]

So, I've been trying to get going with Wilderness, and I keep running into the same question every single time:

Does Pop Growth matter at all to Wilderness? Like I get the impression that they 100% don't care, since they just auto-fill jobs while only making one job slot per occupation to fill. Right?

So for Build purposes... Do any of the Traits related to growth rates affect anything? Or the Civics, like Gaia Seeders (or whatever it's called for Wilderness)?

I get that Rooted is like a free points Trait. Are the slow reproduction Traits also like that?

Depends if your on the beta or not. If not 1 pop per planet, (maybe 2-3 on a super bulked up planet thats fully upgraded), is all you'll need to fill all your jobs. And you need so much Biomass on a planet to get any benefit from pop growth that it's not something that will come into play much. Cradle spam totally outperforms it.

Beta, you actually need 1 pop per job instead of 1 pop per planet, and you can't accidentally spend pops when spending biomass. Whilst Cradle spam remains super powerful, you can still get a decent amount out of pop growth. That said pop growth reduction traits are probably still optimal.