On what's going on in the FFA server in regarding to population.

TroyTiger started a thread saying that is pop was declining for no reason. I started experiencing the same issue after I landgrabbed and built land. It would go up then drop dramatically without any explanation.

Now...

I landgrabbed, succeeded, and I started losing population by about 2k every turn. I wasn't attacked, I didn't drop land, demo buildings, no earthquakes, spy ops, etc. When I put buildings on the land I acquired, my civilians came back.

So seriously, is this a bug, a hidden pacifist mechanic, or is something happening that I'm not aware of?

It's always possible that there's a bug but you guys aren't giving me enough information to reproduce it. Can you PM me the country number that experienced this?

MAX_POP = (1 - 0.95 * TAX_RATE) * (24 * RES_BUILDINGS + 12 * LAND) * GOVT_FACTOR * RES_TECH_PERCENT

You only lose pop playing turns if your current population is above maximum population.

I wouldn’t know what information to give honestly. But I’ll message you

The only thing that I can think of is you gained land which lowered your res tech and somehow the increased pop from the new empty acres was less than the pop loss from a lower tech, but I don't know if the math can work out in that way.

Can you stop playing turns the next time this happens and message me your country number? I build a country similar to yours but so far can't see the behavior that you described.

I’d honestly have to give you all my country numbers, but I didn’t want to waste your time with that. Just thought there was a mechanic I wasn’t aware of. With that specific country I gave you, I landgrabbed and lost 13000 civilians, but they started coming back slowly when I put buildings on the acquired.

But the next time it happens, I’ll stop and message. I do really appreciate you taking the time out looking into it.

You weren't crazy! There was a bug that should be fixed now. It was possible for countries to temporarily get the government bonuses of their offensive allies assigned to them during the turns used for an attack. So if a theo did an attack with a non-theo offensive ally he could lose the 50% max population bonus for two turns. Pop would decrease during the attacking turns but would go back up again once you constructed buildings.

I appreciate you looking into it.

That is what happened to my Theo country Slagpit :-P

I had a Demo offensive ally for a Theo..
Glad you found it/fixing it, I was tired of losing over 100k pop a turn, then getting them back later and slower.

Nice fix!