Beginning stuff

1) 1000
2) 1000
3) that's about it, unless you want to count the bonuses that you gave yourself when you set up your player.

4) No limit on colony ships, 1000 on regular transports, 5000 on combat transports.

I assume that "bc" after money means "billion credits," so 1000 bc would equal 1 trillion credits, right?

I assume this wouldn't apply to population. So would 1000 population mean 1 billion individuals? If so, what happened to other 70-odd billion people Earth is projected to have at the end of the 22nd century?

Maybe World War 3 or 4 happened? Plague? Who knows?

'If so, what happened to other 70-odd billion people Earth is projected to have at the end of the 22nd century?'

Several things:

The population reported in GalCiv is not the colony population but the taxpayer/military population. People unable to pay taxes or serve in the military are assumed to still be there, but to be relatively unimportant at the imperial scale.

You start the game with a colony ship with 100M on it.

I think Brad needs to add something to the pre-game story line to account for this. A 70:1 ratio of actual to reported population is too unreal, even for a game.

there in the freezers waiting to be thawed out, how else do you explain certain rapid population growth hehe

brad should add more story line

Yea, perhaps, but isn't it the most important to ENJOY the game in stead of talking about logic? After all, this is SciFi.

You're right, we should put more backstory with regards to populations.

Population represents # of tax payers. Not how many living things there are. There is back story to this. I think we'll probably get more into the plot stuff in the summer expansion pack (which is free before someone asks).

I've got a suggestion for the storyline. World War III broke out in the 2050s and wiped out a third of the worlds population (let's say 3 or 4 billion). Then sometime in the 2090s, we have World War IV, which is a nuclear war. Most of the surviving human population is wiped out in the resulting mutated plagues, and from 2100 to the time Earth makes First Contact we've been trying to repopulate and fix all the things we screwed up with the planet.

If you think this is a stupid idea, please tell me.

By the way, is there a population limit on planets as determined by Planet Quality?

70+ billion is a projection made by scientists of today, who like everyone, are prone to make a mistake, or simply can't see the events of our future. Things change and the reproduction rate doesn't always stay the same, so maybe those billions will never get born, who knows?

Birth rates are already going down over most of the areas that are historically overpopulated.