Dinkelsen wrote:When building a colony ship it is filled with 1 population unit of the most numerous race on the planet. This population unit comes from nowhere, the planet still has its original population living there. Shouldn't this one unit be missing from the population? Or maybe the colonists are all cloned with the cloning costs factored into the cost of the ship?
My thinking is that volunteers are probably being sent up to the colony ship over the course of its construction. In most situations, I think natural population growth is probably sufficient to explain where the extra bodies are coming from. The theory here is that population growth on the home planet is constrained primarily by the availability of housing / developed resources-- not the maximum possible biological growth rate.
That said, if you buy a colony ship on a 1 population world, and thus complete it it just one turn, the "volunteers from the home planet" explanation does get a little strained. In that case, I think we perhaps do need to assume they're using cloning vats or something