Pop booming - is it worth it?

[MariOne]

Yang way is PTS and Pod-booming (if you don't have SMAX or can't afford the GAs).
A pod-factory base can churn out 2 CPs every 3 turns, under the proper conditions (a couple of BHs and some crawlers available in its radius, few money to rush the CPs every turn).
{credits ot Ogie}
The pro is that you don't need to worry to keep pop-booming conditions in the rest of your faction, the con is that those CP need to travel all their way to add to the more distant bases (once you run out of where to place new ones)

[knowhow2]

Originally posted by Kirov
There is a very big difference between +50% growth and pop boom.

pop-booming only garantee 1 pop grow each round while pod-booming actually can result in as many as possbile (100 pops each if you like).

[Sikander]

Originally posted by ESpark
Question :

I'm playing as Lal, and my booming has gone pretty well - only thing I worry about booming with other factions is that, as lal, I have a bit of "buffer room" in regards to discontentment, as I have a ton of talents at my bases. I know I don't have to worry about pop booming and drones as much for my next attempted player (Yang) since he has a great police rating, and being able to suhpress a lot of drones.

However, what do you do if yer attempting to pop boom, and you've run out of drone-suhpressing items, and your police are in place?

Oh, and do people use Sky Farms as help for booming? I found I was able to pop faster if I had a few flying around.

Use specialists to reduce the number of potential drones in a base, as well as adding a bit of psych. This of course requires some excess nutrients, which you can get by crawling them into the base, or by using terraforming that produces a lot of nuts, or both.

[Ogie Oglethorpe]

Sik is right when it comes to a good pop boom a slight excesss of nuts is right out. Make sure you have loads of extra nuts as this allows you the freedom to continue with the boom and specialize your citizens to stay out of drone trouble. Check ALL your bases every turn during your boom phase and adjust citizens/specialists every turn to keep from drone rioting.

A bit of micromanagement that will aid your game immensely.

[spartak]

As mentioned before simply setting your Psych to 20% will fix mkost of your drone problems and will add to the effectivness of a booming empire.

[Ogie Oglethorpe]

While setting global psych allocation is one way of accomplishing a pop boom, by and large it is not the most efficient means to do so.

Unless you are running wealth and are looking to get a golden age to get to the magical +2 econ, 20% psych allocation strips a healthy amount of energy from bases with little efficiency loss and for those bases that are far flung and having significant efficiency loss gain precious little psych energy as a consequence of the inefficiency. Therefor you runthe risk of over committing the amount of psych you need in order to address teh far flung bases whilst throwing away perfectly good energy at your productive bases.

For this reason, psych specialists (doctors, empaths and thinkers, later on transcendi) IMO become the preferred means to quell drones as you can simply adjust the number needed on a base by base level to keep from drone riot without over adjusting a global variable. The global psych allocation simply is too much in certain base situations and too little in other base situations.

Again it all depends on the level of the game you play and the degree of micromanagement you are comfortable with.

OTOH if you have SMAX (with the Golden Age Pop Boom fix) you can use psych to enable a golden age, run Demo/Free market/creches with most factions and kick off a golden age pop boom. In this case the global allocation is normally a good thing as it allows you to pop boom whilst under the energy rich Free Market SE choice.

[Mongoose]

As far as GA booming goes, remember that you cannot get a GA in a base with a p-sphere.