In 4X games, population growth rates of a billion per year are not uncommon. While it's true that in newly settled areas people tend to have more children, a new colony doubling in population every year should be physically impossible. Sometimes, the game handwaves this by claiming growth is due more to immigration than birthrates, but in some cases one has to wonder where exactly all these people are immigrating from.
Plus, population growth almost always halts entirely once the maximum capacity is reached.
For comparison, a real human population where each woman has five kids would grow at a rate of about 3.3% per year.
Related to Ridiculously Fast Construction, Writers Cannot Do Math, and Sci-Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale. Usually involves Hide Your Children when the new population are nothing but productive adults.
Examples:
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4X
- Actraiser: The hero rescues people to repopulate barren lands, but the population will also increase on its own. The growth is halted when it reaches capacity.
- Galactic Civilizations hangs a planet-sized Lampshade on this in many of the progress reports and flavor text for planetary improvements. "Of course most of this population growth is actually more people reporting taxes and voting, since X billion people couldn't actually have been born in that time."
- Master of Orion III: Particularly in mid-to-end game, once the player terraformed a planet (also ridiculously fast), the population would mushroom to full capacity in a matter of a few years.
- Sword of the Stars: Depending on planetary environment, racial bonuses, and technologies, it can take anywhere from fifteen to thirty years for a planetary population to grow from a couple hundred to about 700 million. However, Imperial population growth is capped at fifty million per turn and civilian at twenty million.
- Terranigma: The hero rescues people to repopulate barren lands, but the population will also increase on its own. The growth is halted when it reaches capacity.
Real-time Strategy
- Age of Empires: New villagers and warriors simply pop out of their training buildings. The third game could have justified it as new settlers arriving from the homeland but that's a separate mechanic.
- Many games by Paradox Interactive that track population use abstract units called "POPs", but you can still see populations double in a few years without resorting to things like slave raids in Imperator: Rome or cloning in Stellaris.
Sims
- SimEarth: The populations of cities will almost always surpass one million, even on lower Technology Levels. This is even the case in the pre-built "Stag Nation" scenario, where the people are trapped in their Stone Age and, in the Turbografx-CD version, are explicitly said to have a population too small to get any farther.note
Other
- The Tribes of Crane: Tribes could grow by up to 10% per month. As pointed out in The Space Gamer magazine's "Murphy's Rules" Comic Strip, this would require every female member of the tribe to be constantly pregnant with triplets.
Non-Video Game Examples
- Gundam: The One Year War was such a bloody and destructive war that 5.9 billion people were left dead (nearly a full half of the total human population in the entire solar system). Yet roughly 14 years later around the time of Mobile Suit Gundam: Char's Counterattack, the Side 1 colony of Londenion (Side 1 being one of the very first places hit by Zeon during the start of the One Year War) has a population of 5 million people. This is a bit jarring considering that the time period between the One Year War and Char's Rebellion also included the Gryps War and the Neo-Zeon War, both of which caused even more civilian casualties especially among the colonists.
- Homeworld: The population of Hiigara went from 650,000 Exiles to 350 million Hiigarans in the century between the first and last game. Though it is possible that many of those people are descendants of Taiidan rebels (who may or may not be the same species)
- House and Powers of X: Justified because of the large-scale resurrection ongoing in the mutant nation of Krakoa the population is swelling quadratically. So basically physics breaking as superpowers generally tend to be.
- Macross: Humanity rebounded from around a million survivors of the first war to an interstellar civilization with dozens of colonies and huge fleets within thirty years (the Macross Plus era).
- Shadowrun: Early game supplements depicted several of the Native American Nations with populations in the millions or tens of millions, vastly outstripping the number of genuine Native Americans that could feasibly exist by the dates when they were set. Later writers for the tabletop game frantically justified this with a combination of non-Natives being adopted into various tribes, poseurs only claiming Native ancestry, and/or inflated demographic statistics released by NAN propagandists.
- StarCraft: The backstory has the Koprulu Sector's Terran expatriate population grow from 32,000 survivors of the three UPL colony ships to twelve billion by the time of the first game. This explosive growth takes 240 years. A little math
shows that this would require the population to at least double every decade, for 24 decades. And that's before you consider the deaths due to the Terrans' infighting.
- Transformers: Prime: Much is made of the fact that the war has been so terrible that there are very few Cybertronians left, and Cybertron itself is a devastated wasteland. While Optimus Prime restores the living core in the finale at the cost of his own life, during the sequel series Transformers: Robots in Disguise (2015) Cybertron is a fully developed world with towering skyscrapers and a booming population. While the restoration of the core was punctuated by numerous Sparks leaving the core to repopulate Cybertron, it's difficult to buy the whole planet being rebuilt so quickly. The only wiggle room is the fact the writers deliberately played down connections between RID 2015 and Prime note , so it's entirely possible a long time has passed. However, implications are that it hasn't been that long between series note .
