Guide to Build India
In Short
If you’re actively trying to not exploit, then I wouldn’t exploit knowing where the birth rate thresholds are.
Just keep working on economy, and decide if you want to tech up the military, or if you’ll be using another country as the beat-stick to fight Alien ground armies with.
At the same time, you’ll need to think about how much investment you want to put into India’s space program.
In Details
I crunched a lot of numbers to figure out the tipping points of when to invest in what, and why. TLDR, if you want max population growth (and you do), pump economy until your GDP per capita goes a bit above 25.2k, then pump knowledge until your government hits 10, then go back to economy (With welfare as needed ofc.).
Don’t take these numbers as gospel, but I wanted to share the fruits of my labor, no matter how questionable they might be.
There’s three important pop growth bonuses: The “big economy” bonus, the “trashfire country” bonus, and the “developed country” bonus. The developed country bonus is the biggest, but also harder to get. The economy bonus is just “gdp per capita = pop growth” but it’s small enough that it won’t affect our thinking.
For the trashfire bonus, you get a pop growth bonus based on the lowest value of either your government or education. That’s a little confusing, but there’s at least something to be said for leaving Knowledge alone up-front. It’s a pretty small bonus for India and its 6.9 starting government, and it’s not worth tanking it into an anocracy for pop growth because its education isn’t that much lower of a score, but it’s something. This bonus is most pronounced for true trashfires like Chad.
You get a pop growth bonus if you cross a magic threshold into being a developed country, but that’s pretty far away for India. India starts with government of 6.9, education of 5.6, and GDP per capita of 7k. You can hit “developed” at G=6.9, E=5.6, GDPpC=50k, or G=10, E=8.7, GDPpC=25.2k. It’s easier to raise your government and education by 3.1 than it is to raise your GDPpC by an extra 24.8k – almost half as much IP investment, in fact. So if you’re shooting for the “developed” pop bonus ASAP, you’ll want to pump Knowledge at some point. The “trashfire country” bonus gives you an incentive to raise econ first, and then sprint for knowledge at the end.
There’s another factor that makes your econ investment more interesting: You get a larger gdp boost, per point of economy, the higher your democracy and knowledge are. This is a much bigger share of the pie for smaller countries, but it’s still worth looking at here.
India’s starting gain is something like $11 per capita GDP per Economy, but if you pump Knowledge high enough to max out democracy, you’ll be getting $12.2 per capita GDP per economy. That’s just a 10% boost, and it’ll take 1200 IP to get there.
If you spend those same 1200 IP on Economy from scratch, you’ll raise your GDP from the starting 11 trillion to about 30 trillion, which is a +172% increase in GDP (but only a +39% increase in IP because of the cube-root IP factor). Still, it’s a lot bigger than the efficiency boost you get from Knowledge.
There’s probably an interesting inflection point, as your GDP goes up, where the per-IP boost from Knowledge is equivalent to the per-IP boost from Economy. But wherever that point is, it’s way above the point where you want to transition purely for the sake of that “developed” pop growth bonus.
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