Master of Orion II: Battle at Antares/Growing your population

This guide has already said more than once, "Population is power." Now is a good time for an example of why that's true.

Games of MOO II are won by industrial capacity and technology. Let's look at research first, as it's a little simpler. In a pre-warp game you start with no research-boosting technologies, so the speed of your research directly depends on how many people you have working as scientists. If your race and planet have no research bonus or penalty, that's 3 RP (research points) per scientist. Now suppose you build a Research Lab, the first research building in the tech tree. Remember that you can only have one of each type of building per planet. A Research Lab produces:

• 5 RP all on its own.
• 1 extra RP per scientist. Since your scientists were producing 3 RP each before you built the Research Lab, they are now producing 4 RP per scientist.

So a Research Lab plus 1 scientist will produce 9 RP, while for example a Research Lab plus 4 scientists will produce 21 RP.

Looking at industrial production and the effects of an Automated Factory, the first industrial building in the tech tree, the figures for construction points work out in the same way, except for one thing - at this low tech level you have no pollution control technologies. So an Automated Factory plus 4 workers will produce 18-19 PP (production points) instead of 21, because 2-3 have to be spent on cleaning up pollution (unless your race is Tolerant; then you get the full 21 PP). Once you get some pollution control, the construction figures work very like the research figures: adding a few more people increases your output significantly.

Natural population growth

You could just wait for the population of each planet to grow naturally, but that's inefficient:

• It's slow.
• Natural population is growth is fastest when a planet is about 50% full. So maximizing natural growth would mean moving people out of your most populous and usually most developed, most productive planets.
• Buildings have maintenance costs, and young empires can't afford to waste money. That means you don't want buildings that are used by only a few people, you want to maximise the number of people using each building.

Population 1 housing colonies

You start a pre-warp game with no technologies that boost population growth, but you're doing everything else ( farming, production, research) with zero or minimal help from automation, so you need more pairs of hands (or whatever appendages your race uses). Fortunately there's a a very effective low-tech way to increase population growth. You can order a colony to "build" Housing, which directs its industrial output into population growth.

You can manage Housing from the Colony List.

Rather surprisingly, Housing works fastest in colonies with a population of 1, so it does not divert a lot of your population from research and construction. A population 1 planet "building" Housing with no industrial buildings and no racial or planetary industrial bonuses or penalties will produce a new unit of population every 4-5 turns. This means you should check every couple of turns for Housing colonies with more than 1 unit of population, and move the excess to production / research / farming elsewhere. That's a win-win deal: you get more efficient Housing as well as increased production / research / farming output.

The easy way to do this check is via the Colony List: click the "Producing" label at the bottom and the List will sort by what each colony is producing. Housing as always at the bottom of a listing so a scroll to the bottom. All your Housing colonies are grouped, and it will be easy to spot any that have more than "person".

Then you can use the Colony List to move the excess to where they're needed. MOO II wasn't designed for Windows, so it doesn't use the common "drag and drop" technique. In fact it's even simpler: click a "worker" icon (in the "Workers" column and the cursor will change to show the icon; move the icon to where you want the "person" and click. When your empire gets larger you may need to scroll the Colony List to find the destination you want; and you can use the scrollbar while the cursor is a "person" icon. Quite often you will want to move the "person" to another planet in the same system; but the destination will be making something else. You can make it easy to find the destination by clicking the "Name" label to sort the List by names of planets (they are always star name followed by a number) so that planet in the same system are grouped together, then scroll until the planets in that system appear. All this time the cursor is the "person" icon, but the game software won't drop the person until you click in the "Farmers", "Workers" or "Scientists" box of a colony.

Don't let colonies stay full

If a colony becomes full, move 1 or 2 people to another colony that's productive but some way a short of full. Unfortunately the Colony List doe snot have an option to sort by amount of spare living space, so you jst have to scroll through it every few turns once some of you colonies get close to full. This can be a pain, but getting a few percent more people may give you a slight but vital advantage over the empire next door.

Technologies that boost population growth

Eventually you'll want at least some of your "baby factories" to start producing real buildings, but you may want to keep up your population growth rate. There are 3 technologies that help you to do this:

• Cloning Centers (400 RP). When you build a Cloning Center, a colony's population growth increases by 0.1 "person" per turn, i.e. 1 "person" every ten turns.
• Microbiotics (900 RP). This an "achievement", i.e. you get the benefit without producing a building. The benefit is that the natural growth rate of all your coloniesis increases to 125% of the basic value.
• Universal Antidote (4500 RP, so it comes a lot later), another achievement that increases the natural growth rate of all your colonies to 150% of the basic value (and replaces Microbiotics if you got that earlier).

There are alternative technologies at each of these levels, so if your race is not Creative you will have to decide whihc one you want and hope to get the other(s) by spying, conquest or trading.