A new version of the game has just been posted to the Play Store. This version has all the usual bug fixes (a big one is it should fix most of the cases where you come into the game and the screen is just blank) but also included in this version is a change to the way population grows.
Or, more accurately, it's a change to the way the population drops. To show you what I mean, here's a colony where we've run out of food. Once you run out of food, you population starts dropping. Previously, due to a quirk of the algorithm, having a low population focus meant the population dropped slower than having a higher population focus. But that doesn't really make sense, so now it's reversed: if you don't have enough food to sustain your population, your population drops faster with a low population focus than with a high one, as you can see below:
The screenshot on the left you can see I have a low population focus and it's dropping the population by about 10 per hour. The one of the right has a higher population focus, so it drops more slowly.
Another change is that your population will drop more slowly in general now, similar to the way population increases more slowly the closer you get to your population limit, now the population will drop more slowly the closer you get to zero.
Population "Cooldown"
Another important change is that when you populate a new colony, it enters a "cooldown" phase where the population will not drop below 100, for the first eight hours. You can assume the people who got off the colony ship still have access to whatever resources were in there to sustain themselves for a little while...
This is an important change, because it now makes colonizing asteroids more feasible. You can colonise an asteroid, safe in the knowledge that you're not going to kill off the population before you get a chance to build a Biosphere. You can see when you're in "cooldown" mode when the population delta is in yellow - it's telling you how fast your population would drop if you weren't in the cooldown period.
