Population

Your population is the people who live in your empire on the planets you own, their basic activities are to produce 1gc per 30 people, to eat 0.1 food units per person and to add networth to your empire by 0.025NW per person. Every planet has a base population. This means that without additional LQs, population can still live there. Each planet has a maximum population capactiy of 40 times the building capacity of the planet. For example every home planet starts with a building capacity of 250: 250 * 40 is 10,000. A planet with 300 size means a 12,000 base population.

You are able to raise this maximum population using living quarters (LQs). Each LQ has room for 650 people to live in. So building an extra 10 LQs on a 250-sized planet will raise the max population from 10,000 (base population) to 16,500 (base population + 10LQs).

A factor which can enable you to have more population than your max pop is researching in welfare science. If your planet can have 10,000 as a max population and you have 50% in welfare science, your max pop still remains at 10,000, but your actual population will be able to rise to 15,000 (10,000 + 50%). Welfare science only gets updated once per day, so the effects will not be immediate.

Now how does population grow? The population on a planet doesn't start at maximum capacity, when you first gain a planet you will get a starting population of 1x its size, for example, a 250 sized planet will start with 250 population. Every tick the population will grow with a base growth of 5%. This means your 250 population will grow to 263 people. And a tick later 276 people and again a tick later 290 people and so on.

This pop growth is decided in your race in the form of a pop growth bonus. 0% bonus means a growth of 5% per tick. 50% bonus means a growth of 7,5% per tick. -30% bonus means a growth of 3,5% per tick.

This is basically how population works.