RSW

I've noticed that the population levels on worlds has been rather high. In fact, most of the pop levels I've encountered have been at or very close to the max population level.

This is great if you're playing an Emperor position, but is very bad for those playing as a Missionary since they miss out on being able to grow converts.

I think it would be more realistic if the starting populations were weighted so that at least half of the worlds started out at about 50% of the max pop level. (Homeworlds would be the exception and continue to start out with high pop levels.) This would seem to be fair to both Emperors and Missionaries.

What do you think?

This is one of the random game tuning parameters.

When you create a game, if you pick "Mess with the initial galaxy parameters", you can select (among other things) the Population factor. If you set it to "0: Average", then the average world will, indeed, start out with about 50% of its max population.

You could also set it to "1: Somewhat High" or "2: High", and the average world will have correspondingly more population initially; or you could set it to "-1: Somewhat Low" or "-2: Low", and the average world will have correspondingly less initial population.

If you do not set this parameter at all, the server will pick one at random, with a strong likelihood of picking 0, slightly less chance of picking 1 or -1, and even less chance of picking 2 or -2. I think this, along with the other, similar tuning parameters, helps keeps the games interesting over the long term: when you sign up for a basic game, there's a chance that the game parameters will favor Emperors, and a chance that it will favor Missionaries--but you don't know how it will be until you get into the game. You might have to overcome odds against you to come out on top anyway.

You must be looking at a game for which the server happened to pick 1 or 2. In fact, it's possible that you were just considerably lucky, and all of the games you are involved in ended up with a 1 or 2. It happens.

When a game is over, all of the tuning parameters chosen for that game will be printed on the final report.

If these random tuning parameters bug you, of course, you could suggest a game with all of them set to 0.

David