This guide is definitely a very useful guide, however in another thread, I posted a reply to do with amount of ships in a fleet, and @Catplayz suggested it be posted here, so here I go.
RECRUITABLE POPULATION
A factor often spoken about in the forums, is what is a good amount of ships
Now, this is very subjective, and really, depends on what type of faction you are:
This is a pretty good baseline for working out your fleets maximum size, even if it is from a ww2 game.
Note that as said, it is a Maximum crew amount, not the amount you should use.
For a faction with a population of even only 10 billion, even 1% is a huge number
80,000,000 people to be precise
So due to this, id recommend slashing even the disarmed nation to a mere fraction of the amounts
So in order:
Disarmed: 0.0001%
Volunteer: 0.00015%
Limited conscription: 0.00025%
Extensive conscription: 0.0005%
Service by requirement: 0.0010%
All adults: 0.0020%
Scraping the barrel: 0.0025%
This, at a maximum gives you 250,000 crew per 10 billion citizens.
And considering some ships have 2000 crew, it is actually quite balanced.
Well, to an extent.
There are other factors that influence crew sign up amounts.
Such as:
Disease, quarantine zones for instance.
Species, after all, if you have some kind of space plant it might work differently.
Public opinion of war, for instance, if they dislike a war currently being thought, citizens might not sign up.
Current leadership plays a huge role as well.
This kind of thing could be used to determine the size of a fleet, rather than just the amount of credits available.
(as if 8 billion people paid 1c per year, you would get around 26m per day.)