I lose around 500 population and get a decrease in total income of around $3 to $4 when I buy a Barracks. As far as I know this improvement does not effect population happiness, income or citizen count.

Does anyone know the reason for this?

A link to my nation can be found in my signature, though I don't know that my nation has a particularity about it that would influence this.

probably boosts your soldier's effective strength above 60% and you are losing a point of environment.

People get weary when they're surrounded by excess amounts of soldiers.

As effective soldier count rises and citizen count falls, only slightly so most people dont notice.

There is no additional soldier count. A Barracks increases solider efficiency. Any other thoughts?

Whenever your soldier effiency improves, your population counts goes down slightly. If you are seeing a big difference from that, then probably Auctor is right and you are crossing the 60% threshold number, which costs you an environment point and a more significant amount of population. You lose pop switching from Capitalist to Democracy, so I know the efficiency affects pop count.

Thanks for your reply Mirreille. Now that raises the issue of why should a nation lose population/environment for military efficiency?

gameplay forum is just for how it is, not why it should be...

You should have at least 0.2 soldiers per citizen. The formula doesn't use soldier count but the modified one with efficiency.

It's a holdover from the past when everything was based off soldier efficiency and not actual soldier count. Back then, none of the displays in the game even showed what the actual soldier count was since all the formulas used soldier efficiency. Using soldier efficiency however lead to some distortions when applying losses against larger nations leading to some having national drafts situations in the hundreds of thousands. To correct this many of the formulas using soldiers were converted to using actual soldier count over soldier efficiency. The issue in this thread is one that never made the transition from soldier efficiency to actual soldier count.

Therefore, dismiss some soldiers and you should be back to normal. The ones you have are now more über, and your citizens are wary of their well-directed truncheons.