Why focus on population?

[muskelmichi]

Since I learned crawler use I never understood the importance of a high population. Yes, of course the council votes, but what else?
I usually play Zak and it seems to me a lot easier to just leave the population around 2 in every base and crawler in anything. Ok, I rely on Free Market and with better police I wouldn't get that much trouble with drones. But it's still a big amount of Recource and time to build all that drone control facility stuff.
Is ist because of these specialists? What's their use?
Asked differently: Isn't it a big sin not to grab the ME in the HQ and build energy parks (land or water, who cares) like hell? Aren't these specialists worth only 3 crappy labs? Please help me, 'cause I'm confused

[Chaos Theory]

Specialists are very nice, as 3 labs = 3 energy not subject to most inefficiency losses. Furthermore, once you get Fusion Power, use Engineers, which are worth 5 energy each. Multiply by facilities and you have a great deal of energy, which can boost your tech rate to greater than 1/turn. Drone control isn't a big deal with specialists, as you may already know.

IMO, the ME is a sub-par project, which I usually skip. If I build it, it needs to be in a base with potential access to an energy park, and if it isn't my HQ, it will become it. I'm not experienced at using energy parks, though. Of course, you can combine the two tactics of specialists and energy parks.

[Blake]

The good thing about population is they grow for free, this is especially apparent when pop booming, especially with nut orbitals up. Probably the only time you get better "Energy density" with crawlers than specialists is when you put the crawler energy through both +100% labs SP's....

[Chaos Theory]

It's hard to claim increasing population is free before satellites, since it requires aggressively terraforming for nutrients (hybrid forests and/or condensor-farms) and diverting valuable resources to the required formers and crawlers.

Remember that specialist energy goes through the same facilities crawled energy does. Energy park crawlers can average about 7 energy/tile (more if you have lots of land and formers), plus FM/ME bonuses. However, each specialist consumes a half a condensor-farm (1/4 with satellites), yielding an energy density that is probably always higher than energy parks, as long as you can manage the population.

[Sikander]

Another benefit of specialists is that they manage themselves drone wise. Yet another benefit of specialists is that they can allow you to run economies with low efficiency without losing much energy (if any) at all. Specialist energy is not affected by inefficiency losses. By changing the sort of specialists you have you can achieve your desired portions of labs / ecs / psych, and can do so much more efficiently than you can by allocating a psych % because you can set each base's psych allocation independently. Like any other decision you make in the game specialists come with an opportunity cost, but they can pay that back by allowing you to access a wider range of SE choices & terraforming styles.

[Pocus]

so by following the logic, why not having only specialists, and supply crawlers? Citizens use their brains, and robots harvest the soil of Planet.
Thats somehow what can happen in the future btw

[Blake]

so by following the logic, why not having only specialists, and supply crawlers? Citizens use their brains, and robots harvest the soil of Planet.

Because Boreholes are decent worked and we need to build em for minerals! . Altough an ICS crawler/specialist purist will prefer to crawl boreholes because of high energy losses due to ineffic... and once they have those mineral orbitals they should replace the boreholes with condensors.

Some players will plaster the map in condensors and crawl all of them, and either work or crawl the boreholes, it's boring.... however it's worth noting that crawling isn't a large part of specialists, later in the game (and lets assume it's okay talking about mid-late game in a thread including "energy park") each condensor can support 6 specialists, assuming it's crawled. However crawlers can be destroyed, if it is destroyed then needs to be worked and can thus only support 5 specialists - but this is only a 20% loss in energy, when energy park crawlers get wiped out it's far more frustrating because you lose ALL the energy output of that tile rather than just 20%.

Note also working plain forest, with nut sats and hybrid forests each worked forest supports 2 specialists, so 2/3rds of your population are specialists... the energy density is considerably lower for forest than condensor, but so is the investment in formers and playing time.

Energy parks were fun to play with when I was just starting SMAX... but after the novelty wore off I've stuck with specialists ever since, they work just as well if not better than energy parks, are definitely less hassle and you aren't relying on getting those SP's. And if you do get a +100% SP or two you can always pod-boom the base and stuff it full of labs specialists.