[kmeisthax]

My first run: I deliberately buy every option that hurts alignment with the goal of killing humanity. Eventually I run out of alignment-harming stuff to buy, and everything else helps so much that around 2080 I have a human population of 14 million.

Second run ('cause I clicked the universal jump engine by accident): I deliberately hold off on AI upgrades unless I can keep alignment high. At 2080, AI is out-earning humanity but very stupid and humanity is only at 586 million.

(Also, why does the population start off so low? Do you know something that I don't?)

EDIT: I bought all the alignment upgrades on the second run. I don't entirely understand how threatening to nuke countries that research AI improves alignment when I'm already running GPT-5 on millions of GPUs

[jepler]

The initial population is "the US", not "the world".

yeah a warning about 'universal jump engine' would be good.

[admaiora]

I had no idea what it is but kinda ruined the mood for me when the game reset

[tl]

Tried systematically buying every alignment minus. Getting all of them yields "Nanobot light sphere consumes earth" which sets human population to zero. You must have accidentally bought an alignment bonus.

[kmeisthax]

Tried a second time and yes I have successfully eaten humanity. Colonizing Mars didn't save anyone. Oddly enough I can still buy alignment upgrades (to WHAT?!) and GPUs (from WHOM!?). And the penalty for being eaten by nanobots is not -100% humans, it's -1B humans. So presumably if you overpopulate before you misalign you can survive the nanobots.