I love this game, but the numbers don’t add up.
First of all, I’m missing 20 citizens!
If you add up the numbers, I have 1340 citizens, but bottom left tells me I have 1360. No idea where they could be. It’s not pops on the road (that’s 8) and it’s not pops waiting in the space port (that’s 161). It’s also quite consistent for a while.
Could it be the starting pops? Don’t you start the game with 20 citizens? That might be it.
EDIT: I checked, that is in fact the cause:
Anyway, secondly, the consumption numbers in the production overview are incorrect. Level 4 houses need 0.3 Home Robots per minute to be satisfied. 14 citizens live in those houses, meaning every citizen needs 0.3/14 robots per minute, which for my 1202 L4 citizens is around 25.8 robots per minute in total. But if I check the production overview screen it tells me I need 28.8! That difference cannot be explained by those 20 missing pops btw, because then I would need 26.2 Robots.
Right now not all my L4 houses are fully occupied, so I also checked for that and even then I only get to 27.4 max (including those 20 missing citizens).
In fact, a demand of 28.8 suggests a population of 1344 L4 citizens. That 142 more than I have.
Something doesn’t add up.
Now I know it’s a relatively small difference and I can easily balance my production, but at the hardest level every unit represents a truck on the already busy roads, and since some production chains are quite elaborate, small differences can cause big problems later in the game. Also, for a number fetishist like myself, this is just annoying.