define pop booming for me

[lord of the mark]

In the spirit of "there is no such thing as a dumb question"

What exactly is pop booming - how is different from population growth, and from a golden age? Is a golden age the same thing as "celebrating" in Civ2? Is it only available in SMAX, but not original SMAC?

[CEO Aaron]

Pop boom is documented under the SE effects of Growth, at +6: POPULATION BOOM. What that means is that so long as your base produces at least 2 excess nutrients, and has adequate hab facilities, that base will produce one additional citizen every turn.

How you achieve that +6 growth factor is entirely up to you, but some factions can only boom in certain ways, if they can at all. The easiest way to boom is to run Planned (+2 growth)/Demo (+2 growth) and have creches built (+2 growth). If you can't run Planned, or prefer to have higher energy income while you're booming, the Golden Age can provide the +2 growth Planned normally provides, as well as a boost to efficiency and economy. For Lal, Zak and Morgan, this is the preferred method of booming, indeed for Morgan, it's the only way.

Factions which suffer growth penalties or can't run Democracy find it very hard to boom, so if you're Yang, Marr, Sven or Aki, you're probably not going to get to do a pop boom without inordinate effort.

For these factions, you can try to use a trick called 'Pod-Booming' which involves making a base or two which can crank out colony pods at a prodigous rate, then add the population from said pods to your other bases. This trick is best used with the Planetary Transit System, which allows you to plant a base, crank out 3 colony pods in short order, then replant your last pod back in the same site, and then rinse/repeat.

[CEO Aaron]

Oh, one other thing, Golden Age Booming is available in both SMAX and SMAC, if you're running the latest patch (this includes the XP compatibility patch).

[Chaos Theory]

Usually, golden ages are very hard to get. The game enforces a cap on effective psych allocation. No base can benefit from more psych than twice its size. If you've founded many bases, you'll suffer from bureaucracy drones, as described in some other threads.

On a normal map, a faction can have 1.5 * (Effic + 4) bases until the bureaucracy limit. At double that number, each base has an extra drone. At triple it, each base has two extra drones, and so on. Zak, of course, gets an extra drone/4 citizens, Lal gets an extra talent/4 citizens, and Domai gets -1 drone (basically). To determine whether you can reach a GA formulaicly, you need to go through a few steps:

1. Every base starts with 1 worker and 0 uber drones (bright red double drones). Your uber drone count is -1 (for the worker).

2. I can't remember if Zak's penalty can create uber drones. If not, you get +1 to your uber drone count at bases size 4 and above. If so, you get +1 per 4 citizens, rounded down.

3. Lal's bonus gives you -1 to your uber drone count per 4 citizens (rounded up).

4. Domai's bonus gives you -1 to your count.

5. Each point of bureaucracy gives you +1 to your count.

6. If you have any drone-reducing effects such as police or facilities, the HGP adds -2 to your uber drone count. Otherwise, it adds -1 to your uber drone count.

7. If your count is negative, you can GA in any base with enough psych. If your count is 0, you can only GA in even-sized bases. If your count is positive, you cannot GA.

I can illustrate this with an example:

Morgan is at quadruple his bureaucracy limit, so each base has three extra drones. He also has the HGP, for an extra talent per base. Consider his size 7 base. Before any modifiers at all, it looks like this:

WDDDDDD (W = worker, D = drone)
-1 count

After applying bureaucracy, it looks like this:

UUDDDDD (U = uber drone, the bright red double drones)
+2 count

and this is what you see on the first line in the psych screen. Apply 14 psych (as much as possible):

TTWDDDD (T = talent)

some drone-reducing facilities:

TTWWWWW

and the HGP:

TTTWWWW
0 count

and you fall short of having enough talents for a GA. If he doesn't have the HGP, then his size 6 base with two extra bureaucracy drones looks like this:

Base:
WDDDDD
-1 count
Bureaucracy:
UDDDDD
+1 count
12+ psych:
TTWDDD
Rec commons + holo theater + etc
TTWWWW
and no GA

You can avoid this problem by keeping your base count low, but then you get run over by factions who have more bases. High efficiency helps, but is usually insufficient. Specialists are no help because they remove the D's at the ends of the lines, which is not enough to cause a GA. In fact, they may even hurt, if what follows is accurate. I may remember this part wrong.

Same size 6 base with 1 bureaucracy drone instead, no HGP

Base:
DDDSSS (S = specialist)
0 count
Bureaucracy:
UDDSSS
+1 count
12+ psych:
TTWSSS
and no GA

[Chaos Theory]

Summary of effects on the uber drone count:

Each drone pacified BEFORE psych: -1
Each drone pacified AFTER psych: 0! (though you still must pacify every drone somehow)
Each talent created BEFORE facilities/police: -1
Each drone created BEFORE psych: +1
Each talent created AFTER facilities/police: -2 (-1 if no drone-reducing facilities/police exist)
Any drones created AFTER facilities (e.g. pacifism) not pacified by secret projects spoil the GA: +Infinity

[UnityScoutChopper]

Factions which suffer growth penalties or can't run Democracy find it very hard to boom, so if you're Yang, Marr, Sven or Aki, you're probably not going to get to do a pop boom without inordinate effort.

If you're Yang, you don't really NEED to boom, as it's quite easy to attain +5 growth (+1 faction bonus, +2 planned, +2 creche), and thus your natural, boomless growth is so high that the lack of booms doesn't really matter. If you want even more growth in a base, crawling nutrients with your super-cheap crawlers tends to be a better solution than trying to start a Golden Age. You can always reassign them to nutrients once you've got the new pop point you wanted.

Once Sven gets Gene Splicing and built sea formers, some bases will be able to grow fairly painlessly without booms just by harnessing 3/1/2 kelp/harness spaces. Actually, despite his -1 growth, Sven's bases actually tends to grow more than he can handle (on Transcend) anyway, due to the frequency with which he starts next to the Monsoon Jungle, and the ability to get a mineral from sea nutrient spaces. But if you really need to boom Sven and you have Gene Splicing, plentiful kelp, and a decent base size, you can certainly use Demo/Planned and doctors/empaths and perhaps a bit of psych to evoke a GA and do the job.

Aki is a bit of a lost cause in the booming department until she can pump out crawlers for extra nutrients.

Even though Marr is inarguably kicka$$, he's still a bit of a mystery to me, and I have no clue how to efficiently boom or near-boom him.

USC