There were two aspects to the relationship between a city and its lords: finances and population. Here, population did not refer to the population of the other world. According to the authority granted to players by the Main Base at the beginning, players possessed the rights to explore and colonize externally. The land and population they developed abroad belonged to the players privately. Not only did the Main Base not interfere, it even provided subsidies. The population in question here referred to the population of D-Earth.
The number of D-Earth players each faction could hire was limited. So far, all the lords' Cooperation Quotas consisted of only ten people. At first, the players did not care. Many did not even fill all ten slots, since they did not want to share the fruits of their factions' efforts with outsiders.
But as their factions grew larger and their colonial populations increased, many lord players discovered a problem: there were not enough high-end talents...
This was currently most apparent in scientific research. The Civilization Repository granted to players by the Main Base was far too vast—so vast that many developers did not even dare to study its branches in detail. On D-Earth, physics alone could be divided into seven branches: chemical physics, geophysics, economic physics, atmospheric physics, biophysics, medical physics, and astrophysics. In the Star Sea, the broad category handled by a single developer could contain dozens or even hundreds of branches, with more than a thousand research points to study. Although developer players' brains were as useful as computers, computers still had limits to their processing power...
Ten slots were nowhere near enough to advance civilization, even if all ten people were developers, much less when there were usually players of other types among them.
Later on, the demand for high-end