Population Growth

[dxmc]

I can't seem to get my population much above 3000, it's just been stuck around there for a very long time, and that's with the beacon going continuously. The illness mechanic is annoying, even with a lot of medical supplies it's still a constant drain on people. I'm wondering if it's absolutely necessary to adopt people from other settlements to keep growing. There doesn't seem to be another way but it's just one more thing costing unity. It seems as though you should be able to keep growing without having to constantly spend to bring in more, but that doesn't seem to be happening.

[HappyTRex]

Do you feed your pop with the 4 food branches ? (this give more health)

Do you have the +0.40/0.80% growth active ?

Do you compense those unity/month loss with households and all foods and machine a laver goods ?

Do you have a... like a "buffer population" of 500 ? They go down on the Flu III, they go up from the 0.80% recrutement when they are health safe ?

You can try to have the +10/20 health unity buff permanent too

[dxmc]

I usually have 3 of the 4 food groups, no treats. I don't have the growth boost because of the unity cost. Everything like food, households goods, is all in the green for unity bonus. And I usually have a buffer of around 500. I haven't used any edicts, I try to keep unity positive and close to the cap, that just doesn't seem to happen if you start adding edicts. It really seems like with 3 of the 4 food groups supplied, and all other needs taken care of, including medical supplies, and with the beacon, the growth rate shouldn't be completely static. As far as illness goes, it seems to be almost constant and there doesn't seem to be much you can do about it, so it seems like an artificial extra layer of difficulty, just one more thing requiring frequent micro to keep positive.

[Peter34]

Do you supply Water and remove Wastewater? That's another +10 Health, on top of the +12 you get for supplying Vitamins and Protein.

[dxmc]

Plenty of water and wastewater dealt with.

[HappyTRex]

Yeah, i can confirm that at your level of play, ~3K, you NEED to have the 4 food for compensante the Flu III. The health edict can help when they are sick, but i found that having the +0.40 constantly on, is better if you have a 500 buffer pop.

For summary, you just need 1unity per month + 4food supplied to keep your pop growth good.

If you have housegoods supplied, in general you have much unity left.

On your screenshots i've saw that you run at +4/+6 per month, so you are pretty large, i think you could try this

[HappyTRex]

And yeah, i havent mentioned it, but the Flu stage is determined by your level of housing i think. Atm i have 2k8 pop, i am still on the flu moderate, i'm pretty sure thats when you have the 1 or 2 first housing of the level supp that the flu level increase.

[dxmc]

Thanks for the suggestions. Providing all four types of food is very problematic in this game and just one more thing that requires constant micro.

I have four chicken barns but I quickly discovered that they need massive amounts of animal feed. Even four farms just producing wheat for animal feed isn't enough, you need more than half a dozen farms just supplying wheat for animal feed just to keep four chicken barns producing, and they don't even produce that much. The amount of eggs and meat I get form four barns is almost negligible and quickly runs out.

Vegetables are another problem. Even four farms growing vegetables won't produce a significant amount, you need at least six or more just to produce any significant amount. And when you get to the fourth category, producing snacks or cake requires a long extensive production chain.

So you need about two dozen or more farms by mid-game. And there isn't really enough space on the whole island, and all those farms need huge amounts of water and fertilizer as well. Trying to grow the factory while trying to manage dozens of farms, farms which have unpredictable production and a population with extremely complicated food requirements, is really just too much. I've spent way too much time tinkering with farms in what is supposed to be a factory building game.

And when you throw in constant, unremitting non-stop illness continually draining your population it's very difficult to see how to get through the later game. I've been stuck in mid-game for a long time and there just doesn't seem to be any way to keep progressing with so many things requiring so much micro.

[DDR-Boy]

the report confirms my thoughts that an internal reconciliation of the assignments of the mass control should take place

sorry, translator

[Kaery]

Unless you radically changed your factory, I remember a lot of active burners and flares. That produces a lot of air pollution which drains your health as well. Try to reduce those?

What causes unpredictable production in your farms? In my experience, unless you are using fertilizer and have supply problems for it, they are reliable enough that you can treat farms as just another factory.

About vegetables: Are you supplying Fruit? Vegetable consumption dropped a lot once I added fruit.

Chicken barns: At which amount of chickens are you running these? The greater the amount of chickens, the greater the amount of production. ...Granted, they eat more food, too.

[DDR-Boy]

Tofu and bread can also be used alongside fruit. Animal feed comes as a waste product or for the chicken coop. I'm skeptical about chickens because they require a lot of animal feed. That's where the farm comes into play again and you have to have several farms with soybeans and wheat at your disposal, of course then fertilizer and water have to be kept available. Maybe you can change this later in the research tree according to importance, let's see.

[dxmc]

Originally posted by Kaery:

Unless you radically changed your factory, I remember a lot of active burners and flares. That produces a lot of air pollution which drains your health as well. Try to reduce those?

I followed your earlier suggestion and got distillation 3 going to use up light oil, so now I have fuel gas for my rotary kilns. And I cut back on some of the burners I was using to deal with excess sulfur. And I'm relying more on concrete than bricks, which has also reduced coal consumption and cut back pollution. It's usually around 25, most of which seems to be coming from smokestacks attached to boilers.

Originally posted by Kaery:

What causes unpredictable production in your farms? In my experience, unless you are using fertilizer and have supply problems for it, they are reliable enough that you can treat farms as just another factory.

The problem is that farms are producing at different times, with different growing seasons. And you have to keep changing what farms are growing as needs change. So you have multiple farms producing vegetables at different times, multiple wheat farms producing at different times, and the numbers are constantly changing. And as this goes on you need farms for canola, sugar, tree saplings, fruit and so on. Add to this that these products get consumed at different rates and it becomes a pretty complex calculation.

So to keep wheat supplied continuously you need at least 6 farms growing it. 4 for vegetables, 4 for corn and so on. Otherwise you're going to have x amount this month, nothing next month, y amount the month after that, and so on. But doing it that way leads to both overproduction and underproduction. Corn and vegetables have the same growing season but produce very different amounts. It's not difficult to keep a lot of corn on hand, vegetables seem to produce a lot less. So that's a lot of farms and a lot of calculation, on top of trying to build an increasingly complex factory. And of course you have to have to have the logisitcs in place to ensure that all that food gets delivered to market as soon as it's ready.

Originally posted by Kaery:

About vegetables: Are you supplying Fruit? Vegetable consumption dropped a lot once I added fruit.

I just started supplying fruit, haven't noticed much of an effect yet, maybe after a few crops.

Originally posted by Kaery:

Chicken barns: At which amount of chickens are you running these? The greater the amount of chickens, the greater the amount of production. ...Granted, they eat more food, too.

I've got them all set to 100%, that seems to result in the highest production, but they all seem to produce at slightly different rates. But none of them produces more than 10 meat/month, and even less eggs. And it's very difficult to keep them supplied with animal feed. Wheat produces the most animal feed but with it's 6 month growing season it's very difficult to calculate. A large mixer requires more wheat to produce a load of animal feed than one wheat farm can produce in a growing cycle. Given how much wheat you need and how little production you get from four chicken barns it hardly seems worth the effort, but then you still need to satisfy that category.

[HappyTRex]

I'm pretty sure that Corn is the best way to produce animal food.

Remember that a farm with fertilizer II perma supply, give more than 2x food than a farm with no fertilizer. Fertilizer prod turn down the pollution a little too, no ammoniac burned.

The setup 1) Import sulfur from mine 2) Export sulfur vs Sludge 3) Create fuel gas with sludge, give you a lot of fuel gas for pretty much no cost, that you can use in boiler to cut some coal use.

[dxmc]

Corn and wheat are pretty close when it comes to animal feed. 1 corn produces 1.2 animal feed and 1 wheat produces 1.6 animal feed. But wheat has a longer growing cycle and produces less per growing cycle than corn. So if you work it out they're actually pretty close. But then you have to take account of how much feed is being consumed per month, how much corn or wheat you need per mixer load, and so on. So when you take all of that into account it becomes very complicated and I don't think it makes a really big difference whether you're using corn or wheat for animal feed.

[Peter34]

Wheat turned into Bread is a superb source of Food/carbs, especially if you bake the Bread at a location where you already have Water piped in such as near the town.

Based on that, I'd say you want to primarily turn Corn into Animal Feed, and secondarily do that with any excess produced Potato, Soy or Wheat.

[Kaery]

Originally posted by dxmc:

I followed your earlier suggestion and got distillation 3 going to use up light oil, so now I have fuel gas for my rotary kilns. And I cut back on some of the burners I was using to deal with excess sulfur. And I'm relying more on concrete than bricks, which has also reduced coal consumption and cut back pollution. It's usually around 25, most of which seems to be coming from smokestacks attached to boilers.

That's great to hear! You can mix sulfur with limestone to make slag that you can dump for more building land, that's what I usually use instead of a burner to get rid of excess sulfur. But that would need more truck-time... Have your troubles there relaxed a bit?

Originally posted by dxmc:

The problem is that farms are producing at different times, with different growing seasons. And you have to keep changing what farms are growing as needs change. So you have multiple farms producing vegetables at different times, multiple wheat farms producing at different times, and the numbers are constantly changing. And as this goes on you need farms for canola, sugar, tree saplings, fruit and so on. Add to this that these products get consumed at different rates and it becomes a pretty complex calculation.

...Maybe I missed something, but the farm does tell you how much it produces of a given good per minute. So if I have four farms that tell me they are producing 9 (random number) vegetables per minute I know that I'm getting (roughly) 36 vegetables per minute, as long as the farms are properly supplied. Belt it to a storage, then either have a truck or a belt take it to the market. The market tells you how many vegetables your population consumes per minute. If that number is smaller than 36, great! If not, you need another farm.

You're saying the numbers are constantly changing, do you mean the numbers in the market? Those only change as more (smaller numbers) or less (bigger numbers) different kinds of food become available. Well, and as your population grows or shrinks, of course. Though you did say you're staying kind of the same there, right. Might be that your problems with the meat supply make the number sway?

Originally posted by dxmc:

<snip> Otherwise you're going to have x amount this month, nothing next month, y amount the month after that, and so on. But doing it that way leads to both overproduction and underproduction. <snip> So that's a lot of farms and a lot of calculation, on top of trying to build an increasingly complex factory. And of course you have to have to have the logisitcs in place to ensure that all that food gets delivered to market as soon as it's ready.

See above, the farm tells you a per minute amount. Use that when looking at production downstream. And I recommended moving the markets to the north of your settlement, you mentioned you might move the factory up there. Did you do this already?

Originally posted by dxmc:

I just started supplying fruit, haven't noticed much of an effect yet, maybe after a few crops.

Not quite there yet, this save, but last update it was a dramatic change the moment supply was any kind of stable. Maybe they changed that, though I doubt it.

Originally posted by dxmc:

I've got them all set to 100%, that seems to result in the highest production, but they all seem to produce at slightly different rates. But none of them produces more than 10 meat/month, and even less eggs. And it's very difficult to keep them supplied with animal feed. Wheat produces the most animal feed but with it's 6 month growing season it's very difficult to calculate. A large mixer requires more wheat to produce a load of animal feed than one wheat farm can produce in a growing cycle. Given how much wheat you need and how little production you get from four chicken barns it hardly seems worth the effort, but then you still need to satisfy that category.

100 out of 500 maximum possible? It's been a while since I saw the interface. (RL has interfered greatly with actually playing the game.) Difficult to keep them supplied matches my experience, though. For the calculation, go by the number the farm tells you. It's pretty reliable unless something goes very wrong.