Housing Issues

[Crimson]

I have built up a sizable town, but I am at the point I have stopped building houses because I am trying to focus on balancing out my resource levels. Now, I have run into a serious issue. My people are dying and their children are not having kids because they have not left the house. And, those who have left are homeless. So, now i am in a bad situation where there is room in houses but people are not replacing those spots for....reasons? I believe it's because a house represents a family. I do not understand this because it is forcing a nonstop growth of people, until you cannot keep up with it. Then you have a collapse, because the youth are not replacing their parents in the house. So right now, my town is dying because the kids did not replace their parents in the homes and won't have kids.

Am I missing something? Because, this seems not right. Why not create a new living building , like a boarding house, so the younger people can go there until they get their own places? Or, remove that damn tombstone feature, and have a 'Max Capacity' per house.

[Ruffio]

Originally posted by MABdad:

Love the game but believe it needs more balancing. I am at about Pop 275, IMHO The Pop aging is far too accelerated and needs balancing (SLOWED DOWN). Notice it take seasons to build anything, or grow a Crop (that seems fair) but in that time the population has aged. This not only requires more and more Housing and therefore more firewood and coal use. This rapid aging also impacts the Warriors. When They die they do not pass down their armor weapons or shields requiring an ever increasing supply chain. Experimenting I can not seem to find any sweet-spot or equilibrium. With all the effort on creating stats for the pops it would seem that they should live longer than a few years. Off topic but I had hoped for something more.... regarding raids. The simple single image and a text box is a bit disappointing considering it is vikings we are managing.

Imho the aging should follow the seasons. With the number of newcomers you can accept into the village, there won't be much issue with lack of growth. Biggest crux is the housing issue though which eventually lead to a death spirral for your town

[Ciel]

I've made a few dashes to see how big I could get a population before it collapses and every time I reach anywhere around 400-500 depending on my stone situation and how I'm keeping up with just spamming homes everywhere it's only a matter of time till some small thing causes a death spiral and it's maddening.

[omgilovesteak]

Or let these poor people live longer! I DONT WANNA DIE!

[MayKay16]

i agree, they defiantly need to fix the housing issue. I went from slowly building up population, to accepting a few homeless travelers, and now my population is almost 500. Now my people are cold because i cant keep up on firewood, and i'm running out of places to put houses due to me trying to keep foresty areas for food, herbs, and trees to regrow.

I would love to see updates on the houses. Making them multi-generational would be a great start. Then adding more benefits and over all max capacity to the better houses that take more resources to build.

[Ruffio]

Originally posted by MayKay16:

i agree, they defiantly need to fix the housing issue. I went from slowly building up population, to accepting a few homeless travelers, and now my population is almost 500. Now my people are cold because i cant keep up on firewood, and i'm running out of places to put houses due to me trying to keep foresty areas for food, herbs, and trees to regrow.

I would love to see updates on the houses. Making them multi-generational would be a great start. Then adding more benefits and over all max capacity to the better houses that take more resources to build.

I stopped play after I reached about 400ish population and ran out of room to place houses. Then population started to drop, and drop, and eventually did halt around 190... Almost every house was occupied by some single old person, or old kids in their 50-60's living alone at home. When you have a economy that is ballanced around a population of 400+ and then drop that much you end up with a lot of production being in ruins, and as population is scatteed all over you still need them to have local markets to get food etc, but now your food production is cut seriously and distribution is screwed.

I will get back to the game once they got a fix for this mess, because I see no point in invest hours into build up something I know will just turn into a train wreck beyond something I can control.

[Ciel]

Originally posted by Ruffio:

Originally posted by MayKay16:

i agree, they defiantly need to fix the housing issue. I went from slowly building up population, to accepting a few homeless travelers, and now my population is almost 500. Now my people are cold because i cant keep up on firewood, and i'm running out of places to put houses due to me trying to keep foresty areas for food, herbs, and trees to regrow.

I would love to see updates on the houses. Making them multi-generational would be a great start. Then adding more benefits and over all max capacity to the better houses that take more resources to build.

I stopped play after I reached about 400ish population and ran out of room to place houses. Then population started to drop, and drop, and eventually did halt around 190... Almost every house was occupied by some single old person, or old kids in their 50-60's living alone at home. When you have a economy that is ballanced around a population of 400+ and then drop that much you end up with a lot of production being in ruins, and as population is scatteed all over you still need them to have local markets to get food etc, but now your food production is cut seriously and distribution is screwed.

I will get back to the game once they got a fix for this mess, because I see no point in invest hours into build up something I know will just turn into a train wreck beyond something I can control.

Exactly this, I have no idea how even 0.3% of people have the Emperor achievement. 750 people and 100 warriors seems actually impossible. Unless you just constantly outrun the death spiral in the first 10ish years and somehow make it happen.

I'm actually gonna try to specifically get that achievement to see if it's even possible.

[meraco]

Originally posted by Ruffio:

I stopped play after I reached about 400ish population and ran out of room to place houses. Then population started to drop, and drop, and eventually did halt around 190... Almost every house was occupied by some single old person, or old kids in their 50-60's living alone at home. When you have a economy that is ballanced around a population of 400+ and then drop that much you end up with a lot of production being in ruins, and as population is scatteed all over you still need them to have local markets to get food etc, but now your food production is cut seriously and distribution is screwed.

I will get back to the game once they got a fix for this mess, because I see no point in invest hours into build up something I know will just turn into a train wreck beyond something I can control.

Same.

[=(FGR)=Sentinel]

Originally posted by Astolfo Thonk:

Originally posted by Ruffio:

I stopped play after I reached about 400ish population and ran out of room to place houses. Then population started to drop, and drop, and eventually did halt around 190... Almost every house was occupied by some single old person, or old kids in their 50-60's living alone at home. When you have a economy that is ballanced around a population of 400+ and then drop that much you end up with a lot of production being in ruins, and as population is scatteed all over you still need them to have local markets to get food etc, but now your food production is cut seriously and distribution is screwed.

I will get back to the game once they got a fix for this mess, because I see no point in invest hours into build up something I know will just turn into a train wreck beyond something I can control.

Exactly this, I have no idea how even 0.3% of people have the Emperor achievement. 750 people and 100 warriors seems actually impossible. Unless you just constantly outrun the death spiral in the first 10ish years and somehow make it happen.

I'm actually gonna try to specifically get that achievement to see if it's even possible.

The only way I can come up with to get the Emperor achievement is to deliberately delay your growth and spend so much time amassing resources rather than growing population that, whenever you have an empty house, you can just tear it down and build a new one in its place with functionally no delay and add one or two houses at a time. Rather than trying to "outrun" the death spiral you kneecap it by having a glacially slow population growth that isn't as heavily impacted by it: If you build a house every time you have the resources, you'll just have a lot more people when the death wave starts and no way to offset it. On the other hand, having the resources to add ten new houses and split off grown children into their own families when their parents die off means that you'll have large age gaps between generations that you can theoretically exploit to turn the death spiral into more manageable death waves, tearing down empty houses whenever you find them to replace with new houses as you need them.

Even if this worked, I doubt it'd be fun to play that way...

[𒀀𒂵𒉡𒆠.n0 m3rCy☣☠]

Funny how you cite the exact same problem with overpopulation on earth.. :D Deathspiral lmao, but dont worry, the devs will fix it. People will stop f'ing all the time, having no more than 2,5 kids, if they can avoid it rofl :P

[Ruffio]

Originally posted by ✠☠☣.n0 m3rCy☣☠✠:

Funny how you cite the exact same problem with overpopulation on earth.. :D Deathspiral lmao, but dont worry, the devs will fix it. People will stop f'ing all the time, having no more than 2,5 kids, if they can avoid it rofl :P

Problem isn't overpopulation.... Problem is you have a population that age 10-20 years in ONE season (year) ingame. You can spot this easy just keep track of one of the houses you have and the family live in there..

Second is how houses work.. You have two top slots that is reserved for "parrents" and then the bellow ones reserved for the kids. The game is called Land of the vikings, but how they handle housing doesn't reflect that much -)

[Ciel]

Originally posted by ✠☠☣.n0 m3rCy☣☠✠:

Funny how you cite the exact same problem with overpopulation on earth.. :D Deathspiral lmao, but dont worry, the devs will fix it. People will stop f'ing all the time, having no more than 2,5 kids, if they can avoid it rofl :P

Like Ruffio said, if you watch what happens when the parents die the occupying slots are just tombstones. This means that homes are not passed from one generation to the next and the whole family just dies off. The whole thing isn't sustainable whereas if they did pass from one to another the population would fluctuate for sure but you wouldn't get these die offs.

[Crimson]

Originally posted by Astolfo Thonk:

Originally posted by Ruffio:

I stopped play after I reached about 400ish population and ran out of room to place houses. Then population started to drop, and drop, and eventually did halt around 190... Almost every house was occupied by some single old person, or old kids in their 50-60's living alone at home. When you have a economy that is ballanced around a population of 400+ and then drop that much you end up with a lot of production being in ruins, and as population is scatteed all over you still need them to have local markets to get food etc, but now your food production is cut seriously and distribution is screwed.

I will get back to the game once they got a fix for this mess, because I see no point in invest hours into build up something I know will just turn into a train wreck beyond something I can control.

Exactly this, I have no idea how even 0.3% of people have the Emperor achievement. 750 people and 100 warriors seems actually impossible. Unless you just constantly outrun the death spiral in the first 10ish years and somehow make it happen.

I'm actually gonna try to specifically get that achievement to see if it's even possible.

I got close. Was around 550 people and 70 warriors.

[Gentle Reject]

Not sure if devs fixed this at all, but I just completed the Emperor achievement. Here's a few things I tried that seemed to work:

tl/dr: fish, manually farm, building placement, skills matter less than distance, leave trees in area you're expanding into for gatherers (and aesthetics), build roads to far away forests, build houses in bulk, raid with widows/widowers/old children, trade herbs and iron, cold people still work.

• Fish fish fish: Saved me in the early to mid game.
  
• Manually farm as long as possible, one farm at a time: AI is garbage at prioritizing seed/water/plant timing. Use bumpy land for farms to use space more efficiently. Many smaller farms are easier for auto farming than few large ones. Don't forget to unassign farmers during winters.
  
• Placement, placement, placement: Maximize space. Split the middle distance between resource gathering/storage, and storage/use. Carpenters/wood stores and stonecutters/stone stores around the edges of main village. Build multiple smaller villages in each resource-important area of the map. Better imo than trying to mass everyone into a large city layout. Eventually, my separate villages combined as population grew.
  
• Shorter distance to house > skills: In my experience at least.
  
• Save the trees: Stop cutting trees in an area before expanding there, then build around them as much as possible. Gathering huts function just fine in the middle of a village built around trees if there are still enough around. I also had hunter huts there too, but was impossible to tell if they functioned properly at higher populations. I've confirmed gathering huts work though.
  
• Sprint to the trees: If you have coins (see trading below), build roads as far as the eye can see. Make villagers sprint a 10k and carry the logs back. When you're amassing resources for a new batch of houses (see next bullet), build wood stores further out, but toward where the houses will be. That especially helped in the end game.
  
• Build in bulk: Time when to build a set of next generation houses. This includes resource gathering, number of villagers reaching 16-30y/o, and number of villagers reaching 60+. Lots of old people and lots of people reaching 16-30y/o = new batch of houses.(Number of new houses each time increases with size of population).
  
• Raid with widows, widowers, and old children: When raiding, train and send people who are either solo parent or old child. Any raider deaths will open up those houses to new families to grow/replace population. Try not to take the L, but send them to Valhalla.
  
• Trade herbs and iron: Herbs sell like mad and the huts don't work winter, which gives more labor when unassigned at off period. Coal is used for winters if you don't have enough firewood, so I tended to have iron in abundance. Use coins for decorations that enable faster pathing for villagers, lights so villagers don't complain, and defense defense defense (so you don't lose every building/villager you have in a single raid).
  
• Cold people still work: Rarely had enough clothes for everyone and they struggled through it. Was next to impossible to get enough leather for high quality/wintery clothes.
  
• Good houses: They majorly save on firewood, smaller ones save space.
  
• Far away training: Build training buildings away from the village, no need to have them close as training is done by global day change, not time spent training/getting there. Saves space

Will edit if I think of any other crucial things that stuck out, but that's a start.

Best of luck y'all!
GR

[EddieMal]

Very disappointed in this game, the mechanics are broken I too experienced the death spiral just after 400+ pop, tearing down single homes and building 2-3 new homes sometimes fixes the issue but not always, the raid and trade scenarios are nothing more than an image with a dice roll for success or failure.

I get that it is still early and we may well see theses issues improved or change as development moves on, I for one will not invest any more time on this game until it gets a major update.

[fefnir3284]

wow I just got hit by this. was at 488 before the great die off, now Im constantly having to make more houses and stay roughly at 190 people. then it hit me, why the hell do I have so many houses and I look at them. a FULL 80% have one dead parent, while 30% of those have two dead parents. and nearly 50% of these have 1 child. seriously?

I got to shelf this game until the aging or housing if fixed. I spent 90% of my time making houses, marking trees to be chopped or refilling worker slots because everyone dies too fast :/

Update: 100% shelving. just destroyed houses to build better ones hoping the new buildings would have no gravestones as parents and NOPE. new houses do nothing to fix the situation.