Apparently It Doesn't Matter How Awful Your Medical Facilities Are...

[Draco18s]

If you simply have every soldier give birth to three more babies every month.

[Draco18s]

Stranger still, when conquered, the sign bit flips

[GC13]

Yeah, the population growth numbers in TLF are kind of ridiculous.

And as far as I can tell with the RCI, you could have a medical RCI of -999,999 and it wouldn't matter so long as the planet's base compatibility was at least five. It seems to function multiplicatively rather than additively, with a maximum divisor of five.

Or maybe things get worse as you get below -4,000? It shouldn't matter, since there should be no way to get that low (except there is).

[Draco18s]

Ironically, the +40,000 isn't actually helping the real birthrate (that is, for the Skylaxians after they conquered it).  It lists a minimum birth rate of 1.3 billion, but the actual population numbers don't change.  Since conquest, the real population has only risen 200m.

[Misery]

Potentially bugged, then?

I know i've had enough trouble just trying to at all influence the blasted birth rate whatsoever (ARGH BOARINES) and it's hard to tell if I'm outright doing something wrong, or if it's being glitchy and weird.  Medical indeed does not seem to help much.

[BobTheJanitor]

I'm not really sure what to do to influence medical things. I can see a race that I want to help slipping on medical, so I go ask the leader to reinvest in medical, which should reverse the trend, and then do a few dozen months of medical dispatch, and the result is that they fall even lower on the medical scale. And if I go look back at their trend, medical has stopped increasing. I'm not sure what's doing that, but I assume it's bugged or some mechanic isn't being advertised anywhere obvious.

[kasnavada]

Medical RCI should be a percentage, crime and planet compatibility should also be. Which would therefore apply to relevant numbers.
Example : population is 1 billion, base baby rate is 1:10000 / turn, medical is 50 => 50 thousand babies / turn.

It would make it much easier to understand than some abstract number which do not really seem understandable...

Basically => Awful = 0 to 50, average => 50 to 100, good => above 100, great => above 150, exceptional above 200 and capped at maybe 500 max.

[wwwhhattt]

I'm not really sure what to do to influence medical things. I can see a race that I want to help slipping on medical, so I go ask the leader to reinvest in medical, which should reverse the trend, and then do a few dozen months of medical dispatch, and the result is that they fall even lower on the medical scale. And if I go look back at their trend, medical has stopped increasing. I'm not sure what's doing that, but I assume it's bugged or some mechanic isn't being advertised anywhere obvious.

When that happen in my game it turned out there was a symbol next to influence, saying that there was a severe shortage of doctors. Maybe that? It wasn't exactly obvious.

[BobTheJanitor]

When that happen in my game it turned out there was a symbol next to influence, saying that there was a severe shortage of doctors. Maybe that? It wasn't exactly obvious.

While I have seen this before, that symbol and other medical related problems don't specifically state that they will continue to cause medical to decrease even if you change the trend to bring medical up and do dispatches to bring medical up. If that's the case, it needs to be spelled out on the tooltip, I would think, so I stop wasting my time trying to hold back the sea.

[ObliqueFault]

While I have seen this before, that symbol and other medical related problems don't specifically state that they will continue to cause medical to decrease even if you change the trend to bring medical up and do dispatches to bring medical up. If that's the case, it needs to be spelled out on the tooltip, I would think, so I stop wasting my time trying to hold back the sea.

I'm pretty sure that's how it works. I once had three different planets with simultaneous waves of suicides, all of which had terrible medical RCI. Their medical kept dropping, even when they had a trend elsewhere. When that condition finally expired, their medical numbers started improving.

It turned out to actually be possible to improve medical despite the condition, but I had to make sure that medical was almost always in a positive trend and had to do a lot of dispatches. In hindsight it probably wasn't worth the effort, especially if what you guys are saying is true, about medical RCI having very little effect on population growth.