Morale 1 Planet

Those planets are severely overpopulated. New colonies would not be able to take 20B at one go, try a much smaller colonising pop (like 1B or less for lower PQ planet).

Build transports and cart off the excess pop. Build up PQ and morale social improvements. Reduce tax rate.

Sometimes I will just build colony ships (they're faster to build than transports) and take half or more of the population and flush them into the void (decommission the colony ship). Eventually, if you're building transports you can have an awful lot of your income going into maintaining them. If I do have a lot of unneeded transports around, I sometimes give them to the minors who are at war with someone. I have yet to see them use them properly though. Usually they seem to end up orbiting their planets and enough of them can send their morale down to 1.

Instead of flushing population, try bringing the colony ships to some productive world. A high-PQ world with the right improvements can hold a vast population.

I'll try that. Hadn't really thought of that before.

I was going to do that in this last game, but My one big planet had a smaller planet with it, and adding population would have sent it's morale into the toilet.

Use colony ships to transport population. They always deliver their entire cargo population to a single colony and decomission themselves, regardless of the nature of the target colony.

~SDC~

This is also a good way to redistribute population between planets in the same system if you have one planet with substantially higher PQ. When you load it the "cargo" will be drawn from all planets in the system, but you can just dump it all back on the high PQ one.

~SDC~

Will there be a cap on the size of colony ships?
When a large AI system defects, I buy a colony ship and load it with 40,000 and sent them to Earth. This increases the moral of the system to 100 and Earth easily absorbs the ship upon arrival. A 50 shield ship to transport the equivalent of 8 or more full loaded combat transports is :notsure:
The game needs a high speed civilian transport ship to ferry populations between star systems. This ship should be available with Dreadnoughts. Opinions?

I haven't encountered any cap so far. Don't know if there even is one.

However, I don't see a problem with the colony ships being better at civilian transport than combat transports. A combat transport is a specialized vehicle intended to land troops on hostile planets and includes loads of weaponry. A colony ship has no use other than carry a bunch of noncombatants from planet A to planet B.

I don't really see the need for the civilian transport. The colony ship does an adequate job. It's cheap and disposable. Basically I don't see those civilian transports having any use unless the colony ship gets nerfed somehow.

~SDC~

Faster, better able to withstand attacks might be nice.

And while we're at it, how about a few pleasure yachts? Lord Grathocke is getting a little tired of these cramped Space Navy vessels!

I read u guys talking about overpopulated planets, how do u know this? Is there a formula that will tell u how many people can a planet hold? Certainly reading what Ray the Wanderer answers here, u can tell he knows what the problem is that affects f18fett but how can one tell playing the game? Only by looking at the moral indicator? dont think so

How do u know this Ray?

More through experience than anything, Bernie.

Dump large pops on a planet and morale crashes. Read the Morale Tips sticky thread in this strat forum. It's helpful.

edit: Have to correct myself here. The tables on pop and morale is in that thread I mention.
[Message Edited]