Chasm wrote:Only seems to happen with gremak tho, that's the weird part.
The rules around exactly when a small "remainder" population vanishes after a population move are one of those small details I've adjusted several times in the past. Right now, the rules are impressively inconsistent:
1) If you move population via the transport pool mechanic, and the remaining population of one of the species you moved off is less than .75 pop units, then the leftover population "vanishes".
2) If you move population by embarking on a transport (using, say, the embark/disembark buttons in the planet info pane), any remaining population should, I think, never vanish. This means it's possible to end up with very small population sizes like, say, .01 units, if you're moving population "by hand", but if you use the pool mechanic, it's impossible to be left with anything less than 0.75.
All of this is needlessly confusing, and the rules need to be adjusted. I've yet to decide exactly *how* to best adjust them, however. I think destroying very small population sizes (.1-.25ish) is probably wise. Such small populations are easy to create by accident, and their slow growth rates and potentially high pop cap impact would likely create confusion and annoyance. Also, as Chasm mentioned earlier, there are situations where it's useful to ship *all* members of a certain species off a planet, and if you have just enough that they easily fit on a transport, that's probably a case where it's sensible to just round down a little, and pack your 1,000,100 humans into 1.0 pop units.
But, if I am going to apply a "small populations are destroyed" rule, it really needs to be applied consistently everywhere in the game -- in particular, it needs to be applied when population is moved around via the embark/disembark buttons, as well as via the pool mechanic.
It's also worth noting that any time you try to move population off a planet, your attempt to do so can be deemed invalid on the grounds that "abandoning a planet is not allowed". But, what exactly does it mean to "abandon a planet"? If a player has 0.1 Phidi, and 1.1 Gremak on a world, should they be allowed to move off the Gremak, even though the remaining planet would be left with such a small pop that it would take an extremely long time to grow back up to a meaningful pop size on it's own? So in addition to the pop vanishing rule, we also need a related "planet abandonment restriction", and both need to be designed to avoid troublesome edge cases.
Sorry if that was a bit tmi
Short version: I'm sorry the behaviors are a little strange, they should get less-strange soon.