Synthetic population growth is anti-synergetic and makes the early game uncompetitive.

*Synthetic population requires durantium, a special resource only available from mining starbases and special improvements.  This means if you don't start with a special improvement on your home world or durantium nearby you are going to lose since early game everyone spams colonies but you can't.

*While you are building synthetic pops, you aren't building any buildings since they share the same build queue.

Proposed changes:

-Make synthetic populations grow naturally like living ones, but have them consume part of your production instead of food.  This way you can scale up your production to use it as both"food" and manufacturing.  This will also free up the build queue in colonies so synth players can build buildings while their population grows.