Very, very interesting. Are you *certain* this wasn't related to the 20K treasury penalty? (If you have more than 20K left at the end of the turn, you get an income penalty. Once you dip below 20K the penatly disappears.)

I know there's *something* in the game that makes late game income drop below the "expected" levels, but I've never been able to pin it down, so it'd be interesting if it's population.

is that why one turn i have tons of money and the next i have none

Reever,

I almost entirely agree with you. However, a high population is one of the best resources there is. You can give up other things for a high pop. When you have that and Advanced Troops Mod, you'll be able to bombard and quickly take planets of civs who have better military than you. And you don't have to worry about being invaded. If your population is far above everyone else, and you're keeping up with soldiering, you're fine if anyone tries to invade your planets.

But I haven't been fair to you, because your numbered ideas are right on. On the last idea, I've played crippling as Thalans and had a 21-billion pop planet where I would dock a lot of my transports (which held 4 billion each). And I also had 3 other 18-billion planets. This was all on a Medium-level universe. So don't you large, huge, and gigantic players say this is insufficient without taking that into account.

Anyway, I was down in tech, and especially tech in weapons. However, my production was so high, due to my high pop, that I could churn out inverior ships and play wars of attrition. If I could get down into their best planets and compromise the defenses, I could send in my troops without worrying at all about the loss of, say, 10 billion people! That's when population can work to your advantage.

Oaty, you're evil. I mean you must be playing evil. That's a great strategy. I'm leaning now towards evil as a most efficient strategy if, as seems clear, military victories are by far the easiest.