Andy, your advise is like a drug dealer, pedaling a GC addiction.
Previously, my country "Scary beyond all reason," was my main country back from the mob war. I took a break for about a year, and when i returned, a previous ally sold it back to me.
Prior to buying it back, the previous owner sold population from their empire, and suffered the pop sale penalty. When i got it back, that stopped. How ever, as it was explained to me in an email from the Game Masters, the damage still remained, and it was pointed out to me that i had a pop bubble, that would go away, but it'd take "a long time,"
I figured that if the GM pop sales where uniform in how the age groups where distributed, it'd smooth over problem. But it only aggravated it. Even with 190 HI, their was no way i could afford the GC to keep the country afloat.
So, i came up with another plan. I dropped the HI to 90, that allowed t
an aside about when i dropped my HI from 180-190 range to 90.
most of my countries work perfectly with an education index in the 120-125 range. this one country was an exception, it just wouldn't work right with an EI below 200. so i was able to quickly retrain the unemployed hospital staff to shore up lost workers, and the high EI, with a few pop purchases, made it fairly reasonable to rebuild my HI.
also, the country i mentioned above "Scary beyond all reason," was often #1 for econ, and a couple times was both #1 econ, and top 10 war rank, which is no easy feat.
I will add that I don't buy pop with gold coins. I do maintain high health indexes and I also boost my population gain by using a high education index to train many high tech executives (in an empire of seven countries) and then trading these for low level workers when I raid. I raid two countries and trade about 45k high tech execs for 600k low level workers in those countries at a time.