The percentages from factories and starbases increase your base production.  Your population DIRECTLY determines your base prod.  No population on the planet and your percent bonuses become mostly useless.  

Not meaning to be a stickler, but the terminology used always confused the crap out of me.  Now that the game uses a CONSISTENT terminology (in tooltops and in techs), lets stick to that.  The tooltips over Manufacturing, Research, NetIncome, and Raw Production will be all you need.

Raw Production is the basis for planetary output.  colony and civilization capitals give +5.  As of v1.1, each point of pop gives a +1 as well (in 1.03, it used to be an esoteric formula which was most efficient at 10 pop, and because less efficient with more more).  Have a Durantium Factory?  this gives +2 for RAW production.  The best boosts are found in Government Techs, which can give up to +100% in total.  Approval is factored in at THIS stage as well.  At its peak, it can give you another 25%.  At its worst, well I dont know, I dont play with low approval  However, lets assume -25%.  Thats a 50% swing in RAW PRODUCTION, by keeping your peeps happy.  The Raw Production is the basis for what you planet outputs.

Based on how you allocate this in the Govern Planet window, Raw Production is split into Base Manufacturing, Base Research, and Income points.  This is where your manufacturing, research and income building bonuses come into play.  After bonuses, it results in Manufacturing, Research, and Gross Income points.  Hence, any reduction in RAW PRODUCTION can greatly reduce your research, or manufacturing (which is split between socal and military), or gross income totals.

This I think brings the "go for approval or go for all factories" argument to a clearer light.  A dismal approval (say -25%) vs perfect approval (+25%) is a 50% difference in raw production.  Meaning, without goverment techs to offset, you need twice as more dismally depressed peeps to be as efficient as the perfectly happy peeps.  Is one factory worth changing the approval?  It depends, in many cases yes, in some cases no, but now we can see the figures of how approval and other mods are affecting raw production.

Now, back to your question about population.  It depends on techs and adjacent bonuses, to determine where the break point.  In general yes, farms are worth it IMO, well over 12 pop.  Simply because this is RAW production, that can be used anywhere, on manufacturing, research, or gross income results.    But where is the break point?  Its difficult to say again because of tech level and adjacency bonuses, and what other buildings you have.  But lets do a simply example using late techs:

an industrial Sector on the outter ring of a Quantum Power Plant Hub will net you 110% manufacturing bonus (75% for the IS's base, and 35% for its level 7 adjacency bonus)

A lossless farm in a minor food hub will net you 6 food.  5 from the base, and lets assume a level 2 adj bonus, so +1 there as well.

6 more pop (mind you need to worry about their approval) or 110% more manufacturing.  Well, without this 1 Industrial Sector building, lets say you already had 1000% in manufacturing bonuses.  And a pop of 12.  And lets assume no other raw production modifers, just for ease.  6 pop will increase your raw production by roughly 50%.  That will therefore give you an indirect +500% in production from that 6 pop.  500% is way better than 110%, so take the pop.  

Now, lets say you had 24 pop world, and it was a science world with 1 Quantum Power Plant (No industrial sectors) with a current manf bonus of 100%, but you find the higher tech buildings take too long to build (or take too many needed raw production points away from research), so you want to make a change.  Like you need to upgrade from Research Academies to Discovery Spheres, and you need to upgrade like 10 of them  Again, 6 pop, or 80% production (only a level 1 production).  In this case, 6 more pop gives you 25% more raw production which gives you 125% indirect manufacturing bonuses ((6 raw production * 25%) * 100% manf bonuses)), while the Industrial Sector will not change your raw production, but can give you 105% more in manufacturing bonuses, totaling 205% (100% from a level 5 IS, and 105% from a level 1 QPP).  205% is much better than 25%, so take the manufacturing building.

Pop however in the previous example may still be worth it if you have only a few buildings to upgrade, because then you can re-divert that planet to full science once the buildings are built, and get a HUGE boost in research points.   If you have a LOT of buildings, and will be upgrading for dozens of turns, and there will be even MORE buildings to upgrade as you unlock additional techs (not likely in this example, as I gave it will the highest tech buildings, but quite applicable early and mid game), then pop isnt worth it.  

But of course each manufacturing building on a science planet could have been a research building  The choice is up to you, hopefully you now have the knowledge to make the correct choice in your situation.

Bonus topic:

And finally, pop versus a factory on a huge world, dedicated to manufacturing.  Trying to keep it simple, lets say 25 tiles available, average of 6 pop or 100% manufacturing from each tile.  X is the number of pop buildings.  Y is the number of manufacturing buildings.  Now we need two 

(6*X) * (Y*1.00) = total manufacturing

Well, its been ages since I had to do min/max calculations, so I got help from the internet.  The solution to this equation is basically where the # of pop tiles equals the number of manufacturing tiles.  This works out the same for any situation of food tech, or manufacturing tech, much to my surprise.  Now this is going on AVERAGES, where food output is the same on all tiles, but it is not.  So, adjacent bonuses do add nuance, but for the crux of the conversation, you want half your tiles to be pop to get max production.

Of course, thats a BIG sacrifice, from a planet, asking it to use birthing subsides for so long, to build that pop (and even much much longer for pop to build up on its own from natural growth, even with a hospital or whatever).  so, more decision decisions decisions.....

Since we are talking consistent nomenclature, did they change Total Manufacturing back to Raw Production in 1.10? Because Raw production was the old name.

At least until the latest patch (which I have not played), it was Total Manufacturing....which I think is a much more confusing name.

However, as you say, in the interest of consistency, I want to ensure I am using the right name.

Yeah raw production and food is now really good. Due to the game mechanics, it's best to get a balance of the two. As I'm on my phone I won't go into the maths of it, but its made farms and +growth a lot better. It's why approval is now very important - it gives both production and growth. hence you should always beeline approval techs early on in the game to ensure your approval stays at 100% empire-wide without needing approval buildings. They just provide such a big bonus early, since growth is most powerful early and midgame, while production scales well throughout.

Growth is now really important for non synthetics.

now all they need to do is fix upgrade scaling and the core game economic system will be in a pretty good state IMO.

birthing subsidies are good, but they also have a big opportunity cost except in rare cases on manu worlds

I get where you are coming from... but there's huge opportunity cost there. ie every turn you spend on birthing subsidies you could be building constructors to get resources or improve your planets, or building improvements, or researching, or earning money, etc etc.

early game is where these things matter most too, and where your micro time will have the most positive effects. late game micro matters a lot less.

I've gotten over 4.0 pop production per turn out of birthing subsidies.....Thats 40x the normal growth rate.  The quicker you get your pop up, the better your planets will be off, period....

Hmmm, havent played synthetics.  but in 1.1, surely more OP now because of the pop.

Or prevented by more simply fixing the sythn pop cap defect.  That is hideously ridiculous for a class 11 world.

With half farms, and half manufacturing, you wouldnt get near 100, on a class 11 planet.  The higher the class, the more pop, with the exception of synthetics, who's pop cap is broken, and you are exploiting to death.

Well, you certainly need crackers and wine with that cheese play.

Yes, there should be extreme penalties for going over pop cap.  When I removed a few farms to try a new planet dimensioning, it took 40 turns for my pop to slowly drop so I could re-evaluate it.  I shoulda just built transports and exported pop.

A non-synthetic planet without food, the entire population should DIE within 3-4 weeks.  the pop loss should be based on that, and the amount of food shortage you have.  -0.1 if just barely over cap.  Not -0.1 if 100 over cap FFS.

Decay is easily changed in the xml, the problem is that it can only be a flat value. It would make more sense if it was exponential, but then again so would growth.

I doubt they will ever change that, they don't care that some people will exploit in such ways. Doing so ruins my fun in the game, but who cares if someone else does? Some people like mods that give them huge bonuses, it's not any different.

R

During the alpha and early beta i made postings about this and even asked Paul in dev stream and chat about it.

If my memory serves me well:

• he stated that a non-constant growth base would give problems and would break the game and they would not implement a proportional growth or proportional starvation;
• that if overpopulation would result in starvation then that would give problems with colonizers and transporters in orbit.

[Functional request] Proportional population growth instead of constant growth including formula for proportional growth and starvation.

Game allows forced overpopulation