Population control

[papitoman22]

I often start good and population rises. When I place wells, dorm, and other services, my population decides to drop. Food is abundant. What am I doing wrong?

[kr00m]

You can try increasing other civic needs, see what’s red. Increase food rations and clothing for a boost. Also you can control noise by using walls and manipulating paths around loud industry areas. Also different races have preferences when it comes to food, room material and shape.

[Gamatron]

Originally posted by papitoman22:

I often start good and population rises. When I place wells, dorm, and other services, my population decides to drop. Food is abundant. What am I doing wrong?

I assume you use the immigration mechanics. You must manually accept new immigrants, or set it to auto to gain new people. Immigration happens when happiness is above 70%. Wells and dorms and lavatories is the way to go and should increase happiness enough for 200 people or so. After that, it's possible crime sets in, so you should import some battlegear and build some watch towers, or it's quite possible it spirals out of control and your plebs become unhappy.

[papitoman22]

I have given them dorms, wells, hearth, and other services. It is when I give them these services is when they start leaving. I accept all immigrants that I can. Some service buildings can't be built because population has decreased or insufficient.

[Gamatron]

Originally posted by papitoman22:

I have given them dorms, wells, hearth, and other services. It is when I give them these services is when they start leaving. I accept all immigrants that I can. Some service buildings can't be built because population has decreased or insufficient.

It sounds like you might be running out of workers? Check the hammer top left, if that number is negative, you're in big trouble. People actually don't leave anymore, only slaves do. Regular citizens resort to violence instead, so they might be killing each other.

[papitoman22]

That's exactly my issue. So how do I combat this? The immigration is not keeping up with the lack or workers even having service buildings.

[memechief]

you can manually manage amount of workers you have assigned to each building. Things like wood clearings, mines, fishing areas, etc. take up a relatively huge amount of pop. Building large workshops with multiple max size workspaces also can take a lot of pop, as can training regiments for war.
In the early game, focus on balancing out enough of your workers to cover your needs and grow to expand from there. Advanced services like bathes and apartments aren't worth it early game. As long as you maintain enough food and production of some basic goods like furniture and clothes, you can sell the extra and import things to work on improving your pop happiness through building stone roads, some statues and lamps at night, for example.

[Gamatron]

Originally posted by papitoman22:

That's exactly my issue. So how do I combat this? The immigration is not keeping up with the lack or workers even having service buildings.

As soon as you run into a lack of workers, you must stop building new work places, or deactivate some. You Can start with worker-less services such as dorms and wells and then wait until you've got all the happiness bonus possible from them and immigration. Only expand with a new type of service if you have the workers for it.