NationStates Jolt Archive

Do different nations grow their population at different speeds?

I have two nations. Alarian Mountain & whitelilly, both started at the same time on the same day, both with the same settings.. i noticed today that they had two different populations by abou 5 million. Alaria is an anarchy.. and i the other is more closer to authoritarian democracy.

Angel

There's a random aspect. They'll stay close, but not grow at exactly the same rates. Political affiliation is irrelevant.

There's a random aspect. They'll stay close, but not grow at exactly the same rates. Political affiliation is irrelevant.

ok, thankies ^.^

Aren't there also issues that slow the growth of nations?

Aren't there also issues that slow the growth of nations?

No, issues don't change the population whatsoever.

No, issues don't change the population whatsoever.

Really?

I'd have thought the issue where you can restrict families to one child each would slow population growth.

The mods and other, older players than myself, have said time-and-time again that issue choices don't affect your population.

The mods and other, older players than myself, have said time-and-time again that issue choices don't affect your population.

You've been around long enough to probably be an authority on this yourself. :)

The way to test this is to simply write down each day your population. Then make a puppet. Each day write down its population. Make sure neither nation ever goes "on vacation mode" and then compare the two timeseries.

It has been suggested / requested in NS2 that issues will impact population growth rates.

I'll reconfirm what TH said, issues do not affect population.

You've been around long enough to probably be an authority on this yourself. :)

Thank-you for the compliment, Mik.

The way to test this is to simply write down each day your population. Then make a puppet. Each day write down its population. Make sure neither nation ever goes "on vacation mode" and then compare the two timeseries.

However, population is random each day; so, two nations compared to in the same time frame will have different populations, if I'm understanding your statement correctly.

I would think a more accurate way of testing this, though already confirmed to be untrue, would be to create a "puppet" nation and record the population daily, set to choosing one issue a day, and during an issue that would "slow down population growth" (say, the accepting or not accepting refugee one), see if your population decreased based on that.

I'm not sure how many actual issues there are that would "decrease" population... so, you may just be able to do this with any nation who gets the issue. I'll keep an eye out and post the results as a test.

It has been suggested / requested in NS2 that issues will impact population growth rates.

Yes, I'd like to see that, as it would ask another interesting conundrum to choosing an issue selection.

3 or 4 months ago, probably in Gameplay, somebody did a population experiment. I think it might have been Qaaalchoura. They created 27 countries, one of each government type, and set them on No Issues for about 60 days. Seems to me they published a nice little algorithym that probably matched the game engine fairly closely.

While this particular study didn't deal with issues, I think somebody responded to the topic with the results of their own experiment. One conclusion that I drew was that people here have entirely too much time on their hands.

Go ask Luke (Qaaal). He's probably anal enough to still have the spreadsheet on his machine.

I can assure you that no issues have any effect on your population. Yes, some issues require a certain minimum population, they have no effect of population growth. Trust me, I've seen the code for each and every issue (for those not familiar, I'm a puppet of Hack's).

Starting nations receive one million per day until their population reaches the 10-20 million range. After that, the people per day slowly increases until it's somewhere in the 5-8 million per day range.

Since growth is random, nations created at the same time will have different populations as they receive different population boosts. I have three nations all created within 5 minutes of each other, and their populations have a gap of around 10 million between the highest and the lowest nation.

Long term population growth shows that the randomness is actually working right. Those three nations are all over 3 billion. When they were at the 1.5 billion area, they had close to a 50 million difference between top and bottom. As one would expect, the longer the random growth happens, the less the difference becomes. Of course, I don't think that the difference will ever be much less than 10 million, given the population growth range.

And, as a fun bonus, the "smallest" of the three was once second largest, so you can see how these things change.

So, yeah. Wrapping it back up, issues don't affect population growth at all, that's just a myth of nationstates. Vacation mode and number of issues per day also has no affect on growth. Neither does your UN category, your Civil Rights, your tax rate, or anything else.

-The Caloris Basin (The Most Glorious Hack in "Diguise")