is not having farms hurting me?

I had this trouble too, build them only on good planets PQ10+, this will give you the benefit of more income from more people paying taxes, don't bother building them on small planets.
I was pretty much losing alot of games till I read the unofficial strategy guide, which you can get here Link

Oh yeah. Population is good. What I do is set up a lot of my planet as cash planets. A couple farms, enough happy places to make them happy, then the rest of them economy/money facilities.

Then I have a couple planets with manufacturing and several that do research. but most are money planets. Because research and manufacturing don't do you any good unless you can afford to run them at max capacity. Or as much good.

That are the reasons why I play as a populist (+20 morale +20 diplomacy) and as addition skill +30 economy and +20% morale or something like that....

I can't imagine playing anything different

dersleeper, I am playing as Federalists with economy bonus on max right now and a little bonus into morale. I am rolling in credits!

If you don't build farms you don't get enough citizens to pay taxes. More citizens is good because it means more taxes, if and only if you pay close attention to the morale issues. I think most people underestimate how quickly they need to research the various xeno entertainment techs - also watch out for new types of entertainment where your old stadiums do not get auto-upgraded. Also, it is better to smooch a population of 20b with 20% taxes instead of a 10b planet with 40% taxes due to the morale penalty for high taxes.

Remember, if you get into popularity trouble and can't build enough low-tech entertainment do this: emphasize research in your empire to cut research times, then quickly research your entertainment tech. Once you got it, shift to social production emphasis in order to get those improvements built quickly. Then switch to a more balanced mix when you're over the crisis. What you shouldn't do is fill your planet's tiles up with countless low-tech entertainment buildings: that will never solve your real problem.

Finally, a planet with only 10b is way easier to invade than a planet with 22b citizens. One is the obvious reason that "big armies are good", the second and more subtle one is that the enemy needs high logistics to make a big fleet with billions of soldier. Not all opponents will have high logistics and then they'll have to take their total of, say, 10b soldier and invade over 2 or 3 separate attacks (much weaker than slamming the planet with all 10 at a time)

Personally, I rarely if ever use farms. Yes, I know that more people equals more revenue. However, there is also a large increase in unhappiness when the population gets larger. I have better use of my tiles than to put multiple population happiness achievments down. On capital planets that I capture/have I receive 10billion peeps. On non-capital, I get 5billion. If I need money I simply raise taxes up to but not over 69%. This usually suffices. If however it doesnt, then I usually cut spending some and raise my emphasis in the ability I need at the moment.. IE... Military, Social, Research. The argument that you need a large army may be true early on in the game but rarely do I encounter much hositilty against me during the early stages. If you research the planetary defense tech tree, You can usually fend off anyone that attacks. If you arent succesful, then I usually try to have all my planets with at least three transports. I use these to take my planet back again asap. If I lose a planet rarely does it remain in the grasp of my enemy for more than a couple of moves. Smaller populations are easier to deal with and free up tiles that you would ordinarily spend on happiness improvements. These tiles can then be used to improve your planet defense. Also, If you research planetary offensive techs, This too seems to help your abilities to protect the planet. Thats my strategy and so far it has worked for me.
I play challenging on medium to gigantic maps. Not sure if my strategy works on higher levels yet.

Build farms everywhere. It's best way to generate cash.

One farm on class 6 & 7 planets, two farms on class 8 & 9, three farms on class ten, four on class 11, five on class 12, seven on 13, eight on 14, ten on 15, and 12 on class 16+. Of course the best way would be to add these each time pop hits cap but on gigantic universe you probably don't want to micromanage that much.


You can make so much taxes from your population that trade is irrelevant... like a few % of total income (well, or less than one percent)..

Build farms everywhere. It's best way to generate cash

yeah totally
farms / culture / cash - its a game winner, altho partly because mostly the AI doesnt seem to get it

I put at least 2 farms on 95% of my planets, the larger ones may get more depending on how things pan out

understanding population management is a required skill and for all you guys who arnt building farms, next game try putting one on every planet and then maybe 6 months later give them all another one and watch your population level rise and rise until you can have your own way in the UP and have huge income

Once you start getting populations on a single planet of 30+mil (happened to me a few times) managing the little buggers becomes a nightmare. As a stopgap solution i usually load a few million of them into transports and cart them off to wage war.

That's another incentive for large population - you can build tons of transport ships. With the advanced trop mod you can make fast transport that can carry 4 billion troops - if you take that out of the default 5 billion you pretty much took everyone away (Imagine the ramifications)

And yeah, if you take lots of economic bonuses are are rolling in cash, imagine if you had a bigger population

In my current game I'm making about 3,000 BC surplus per turn - I have so much money that I could end the game -right now- by giving each of the alien race that aren't "close" to me an extremely large amount of money and then ally with everyone.

You guys forget about the stock markets that give +30 economy +10% approval and + 5% influence..

so what's better ?

a huge population, low tax, planets full of farms & approval building
or
a small population, high tax, planets with 1 or 2 farms max and tons of stock markets (around 6 stock markets do the job of one approval building, in late games..)


from my point of view small pop is better because farms add always the same cash but stock markets add %.. so it's just a matter of how much income your planets need to have for stock markets to make more $ than farms..
for example, if your planet make like 50bc/week : 3 stock markets can make more cash, approval & maybe even influence than 2 farms and an approval building..

I didn't install the latest patchs, I know farms give more pop now so it might be a little different but still, I don't think trying to have a huuge pop is good, either small or medium is best

Personally, I'd imagine the goal would be to max out your spending at 100% at all times. I've tried playing games with farms and without farms, and I find that without farms, I'm usually forced to limit spending, at which point, why the heck would I build more factories and research centers, since they would go idle anyways - I could just increase funding to my existing ones for the same effect. But at the same time, you don't want to be making too much extra money, because buying items is less efficient than building them.

Unfortunately, I've found that specializing planets for pop/cash doesn't work very well either. These planets usually fall far behind in social production - as with research planets, you can "focus on" social production which diverts research directly to production, bypassing the need for factories at all. But with cash planets, they don't produce enough production or research, so I'm usually stuck building multimedia centers and banking centers extremely slowly while all my other planets are wasting their social production.

Generally, I'm finding my best strategy is to create at least 1 farming planet, 1 research planet, 1 manufacturing planet, to best utilize capital bonuses. Other planets with special global bonuses (rings, moon, events) I'll specialize too, but all other planets I generalize, since it doesn't really matter where your research or constructors are coming from, so long as they do so at a steady rate. With 1.1and unused social production diverting to manufacturing, I think I might revert to specializing cash planets, since I can pump social production up, reduce military production to 0, and just have my main manufacturing planet churn out ships.