What is the fastest and or easiest way to get more population
Also how to increase my economy rapidly
So the fastest temporary fix is changing out governors but longer term having more smaller pops helps. Since generally lower population plants reproduce faster.
As for economy it depends on the part of the game but if at the start having a population on luna for civilian to make runs to used to help a lot but I think in changes either made or coming the effectiveness of that may decrease.
Fastest - capture alien colony. 
Simplest - get good “Population Growth” governor and wait.
Increase the economy - build mines, construction and financial facilities.
SM mode On
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Note that while small colonies have a higher relative pop growth, a huge colony will have a higher absolute pop growth. Because 10% increase on 1 million cannot rival a 1% increase on 1 billion. So don’t drain your homeworld just to create seed colonies.
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Drop 500k people on every marginally habitable planet you encounter with a bit of infrastructure. Make sure they’re connected to your other colonies with jump gates for civilian trade access. Once they hit 3 million pop they start producing trade goods other than infrastructure. Usually this is also a good time to give them a spaceport, maintenance facilities, a garrison, and a few local defense ships.
Build lots of financial centers and put them on colonies with no mining or production output. Research the wealth generation tech line.
That’ll have you covered for wealth, including enough to buy the output of all civilian mining colonies. Those are useful micromanagement-reducers for settled systems and also provide decent sensor coverage.
I disagree with this principle.
What matters is the marginal growth of population. That is, how does the net growth of the colony change when we add some more population?
Here are my largest colonies, sorted large to small, with a calculation of marginal growth of the next 1m pop added to the colony.
The smaller the population, the higher the marginal growth rate. When the population reaches 1/3 of the capacity of the body, the growth rate starts to suffer an overcrowding malus, but absolute growth amount keeps increasing until 40% of body capacity. After that, the marginal growth rate is negative, which means that adding more population actually reduces the absolute pop growth, not just the rate of pop growth. You can see near the bottom of the list that FED-AAst1 is in this situation. It is currently at about 60% of body capacity.
You might notice some colonies with 0% marginal pop growth. Those colonies are at or above the max capacity of the body, which means they have no pop growth. Adding more population won’t change that, so the marginal growth of the added population is zero. (Filling colonies to the brim like this is bad for pop growth, obviously, so you should only do it when you have particular reasons to, which I did for all of these.)
There are valid reasons to not spread population out to seed colonies as much as you possibly can, but the more spreading you can do, the more your population will grow.
I will say this: for a very long time into the game, the best use of your highest pop growth governor is going to be on the homeworld, because that’s where the percentage increase will have the biggest effect.
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