Colony population.
The entire population of a colony is divided into groups, birth years, and age brackets.
Age brackets.
They determine the age at which colony residents move into a particular group. The player can adjust the bracket boundaries during the game. Changing them causes particular economic and social effects. There are also fixed brackets that depend on many parameters, such as health and colonist satisfaction. Population fertility is an example of a fixed bracket; retirement age is an adjustable one.
Birth years.
The colony's population is a living society. We track it in layers of one in-game year. Colonists in each annual layer have characteristics that differ from those born in another year. A group's overall characteristics are calculated as the average of the parameters of all colonists in that group. If a player creates a ten-year gap in the education of young colonists, those age groups will affect the overall statistics until they die, another 50 to 80 in-game years, or two to three years at real-time speed. Accepting emigrants into the society affects it accordingly.
Each year, as people move into the next annual group, their characteristics are adjusted. For an annual layer corresponding to school education, for example, the calculation starts with basic intelligence-growth characteristics. These are modified by several factors, above all the quality of schooling, which in turn depends on teacher standards, funding, how well schools are equipped, the level of the curriculum, and education settings chosen by the player. As they study and grow older year by year, children therefore increase their intelligence and, of course, a whole range of other characteristics.
Population groups. Newborn Infant Child School student University student Worker Soldier Scientist Engineer Officer Artist Entrepreneur Criminal Disabled person Pensioner Movement and distribution among population groups depend on age, bracket settings, and education-system settings.
Characteristics of annual population layers. Intelligence Loyalty Health Professional skill Mutations Satisfaction Tolerance Local adaptation Patriotism
Overall characteristics of the colony's society. Average life expectancy Average birth rate Religiosity Wealth Infant mortality Mortality from environmental factors Mortality from industrial factors Criminalization
Some changes and additions may occur during development, but this is the basic foundation.