I'll share my strategy. Next time, take this to the help forum though.
It combines several methods, including, eventually, gold coins. There have been several posts about population growth and a number of game updates talking about it over the last few years I have been gone. I believe the information in them is not entirely accurate.
The key stat to grow population naturally over time is average age. The lower the better. If it gets too high, growth will slow and stop. Higher still, it will recede. Your health index has short-term and long-term effects. Over the long term, it is more damaging to have it too high. I find the middle ground to keep a good welfare index and avoid long-term damage to my average age is about 130.
Also, if and when you choose to use gold coins to add population, your new population tends to look like your current demographics. For this reason, to the most value out of your purchase, it is ideal to
Long time ago but:
I agree with most of Aries advice.
changes in the average age are in most cases linked to interventions, including wars.
natural growth will in time create the right mix of ages.
but health care is very important.
we now (quite long) try to protect the population against decline, even in countries with a high population.
except for war and transfers, the important factor in the decline, or slow growth of the population is death as result of health problems, in all age groups.
The higher the health index, the lower the death numbers.
The cost of an oversize health system can be prohibitive but death numbers will decline and can decline to very low levels.
Andy you have commented a few times now about maintaining a high health index to prevent countries with very high populations from experiencing a decline but i've seen several countries with Health Indexes >200 that are still experiencing significant population declines.
At what level Health Index do you expect populations to stabilize for countries with significantly higher than 120m population?
what is significant.
give me a world/country name and I will look into it.
GR 001 in Golden Rainbow
FB 3 CD Russian Federarion in Fearless Blue
These two does not have > 200% health index yet.
What would be the health index suggestion?
Sun (WG)
Total Population 136,073,525
Average Age 39.14
Life Expectancy 69.00
Expected Number of Births 1,724,410
Expected Number of Deaths 1,961,986
Health Index 222.24
I looked into SUN on WG.
The lower age groups are now growing a bit but very slowly.
There is a break at the 15-18 group.
It is much larger than the 12-15 group and will keep declining until the difference is reversed.
this will take a long time.
it probably happened because of an older event, or intervention.
increasing the health index will make the younger groups grow a bit faster but even then, it will take a long time and I am not sure it is worth the cost.
On the other hand, if you do not increase the healthcare index, the groups older than 18 will keep declining and at the end will produce a smaller number of babies and reduce the birth rate.