What they said was not that they were lowering the caps but that roughly anything over 50 would see diminishing returns on the amount of production you would get

We are an experiment with the Yor. Yor can in fact just flat out Build Pop, that is what the Assembly project dose. To increase your population cap you research up the new Power Branch of the Yor Tech tree. In fact all their planets start with a Pop cap as high as the capital of most worlds. You can research up to 44 pop per planet, which is quite high these days. Without having to build any farms. 

The end result is population is harder to build early game, but once you get the Yor can reach max pop very quickly.

That said we will probobly be tweaking this for beta 4, but we wanted to see how players liked this system. 

Interesting.  Thanks for giving an actual graph - it's nice not having to rely on guesswork!

Looking at it though, a 120 pop. world would still have double the production of a maxed-out Yor world.  The tiles they get freed up (about 7-8) could provide an additional ~800% manufacturing to the basic ~1000% manufacturing you'd see on a well-developed world of either variety.  Net result: biological world has about 880 production, and Yor world has 760 production.  I guess this means that biological races can get a lot more out of worlds with lots of free land, but Yor do better on worlds with limited tiles.  I guess the tradeoff is more interesting than at first glance.

yeah, one advantage the yor have is all those small worlds are suddenly useful to them when they are almost pointless to other races. Being able to have 48 pop on every world means that a small cluster of worlds which wouldn't do much for other races will be very powerful for them. This gives them a somewhat different playstyle, which is always welcome. I really like the idea, but it will need some tweaking.