Reaching 900 Citizens

[Knightmage Bael]

I'm up around 700ish, or was. I find the more people I have, the more outbreaks I get, and somehow people are freezing to death (I have over 3000 stored coal and 3000 stored firewood seperately). I have plenty of food, homes, and clothes to make sure people are warm, fed, and housed. I also have about 8 hospitals.

(probably uneccessary, but an overabundance of materials and people led me to make that many)

I thought it would be no problem, but apparently geting there is becoming quite difficult.

[Hat8]

More markets and more homes near jobs.

[Knightmage Bael]

Yeah my homes are always near the jobs. I've kept careful track of that. I have tons of storage barns too, and lots for stone, wood, etc in places where I cant quite get coverage for the markets. Space is a bit stretched at the moment.

[Knightmage Bael]

Okay.

So I figured, that since I have an educated populace of like 80%+, I'd turn off all my schools and see what happened. I forgot that students cant reproduce since they're not counted as adults yet. So it took longer for them to reach adulthood (18 years old?), where as uneducated citizens become adults much earlier, which means they can marry and have kids earlier (ewwww).

Having an educated populace seems to put a soft cap for me at around 650ish people. The higher educated your population is the slower they grow. Go figure.

[Tony 101101]

An uneducated population can quickly tank your productivity....
The result can often wipe out a town

[Azunai]

uneducated people breed faster. i think couples stop having kids when one of them turns 40 and they seem to have kids about every 5-6 years or something, so a young couple of uneducated 10 year olds can have 1-2 more kids than a couple of young students that "lose" a few more years before they start making babies.

but on the flipside, uneducated people seem to die due to accidents more often. you get way more gatherers eating poisonous berries and foresters getting killed by fallign trees etc. if they are uneducated.

i guess it evens out in the end. they are less likely to get old, but if they die, that can also free up houses (if they were a lone widower occupying a whole house alone after their mate died), so a new couple can move in and produce offspring.

[Knightmage Bael]

Well, for me, turning off schools for a few years quickly spiked my population. So I got the 900 citizens. Now I think the only other feasible achievements with this current town...educated population is still at like 50%.

Reopening schools to see if I can get my whole populace educated, and clothe everyone in warm clothes. I still need to keep this town running for a whole 'nother 100 years to get that 500 population after 200 years achievement, which is annoying. Haha.

Except 2% of my population still aren't clothed for some reason.

I dunno hoodafuq is running around naked but they need to put some clothes on. XD

[Knightmage Bael]

Its a nightmare to manage this at all. There's no way to keep everyone warm. I have thousands of logs and coal. A dozen markets, storage areas all over the place, nobody is warm in the winter, like half the city freezes. I need tools to mine all the coal, they go through tools like nobody's business, forcing me to build more mines which also require tools that they use up, meanwhile the food production has major issues.

I know I have more than enough food to feed everyone, but for some reason they're consuming far more than they should. I have about 900 citizens eating 110,000 food, only producing about 80,000, when my highest amount of food produced one year was actually somewhere around the 110,000 mark.

Now, I am on a medium sized map.

I have found gatherers, hunters, and fishes VERY useful because they are ALWAYS getting food. Same with pastures. Year round production. Crops are seasonal based, so as much as you get a lot of food from them, it stores up and gets used up FAST.

I have seen some houses (with only like 4 people or so) store up like 250 wheat, 100 berries, 75 onions, 50 roots, 125 firewood (For whatever reason) - basically hoarding. Their entire inventory page just FILLED, meanwhile their neighbors have next to nothing. Some houses more greedy than others.

I tried the Stalin method, just left the bloody game running while I went off and did something else, came back and basically every single person was dead. (got me the achievement for 400 filled graves) They were all in different areas across the map, nobody got clothes, tools, food, and warmth, because each person producing those were across the map, lol.

-----

Now, my suspected reason is because I accepted a group of like 200 nomads, which got everyone the pox and although I got the 900 citizen achievement, a lot of people died, and my education percentage plummeted through the floor down to a measely 20%. So I'm working on getting that up to at least 60% and see how much more I can produce that way, but keeping everyone fed...I may not be able to do it in time.

I'm not sure if that's going to work, but if I run out of food reserves, then everyone is going to starve, and then it turns into a cyclical effect where somehow nobody winds up eating.

[Azunai]

don't know if the clothing and education achievements work correctly. pretty sure my last town had over 200 adults for decades and they were all educated. the last uneducated guys from the early game died long ago and i never accepted nomads. maybe the nomads on the map still count against the achievment or something (even if they are just passing through and you didn't accept them).

the clothing achievment also seems difficult. i think the percentage constantly fluctuates when citizens don't grab new clothes before their current clothes become useless. i've watched some individuals running around and some of them actually went to the market to grab new clothes when their current clothing was down to "ragged" quality, but i guess if the clothes break while they are too far from the market they may count as naked for a while until they get their new clothes.

i guess i might actually try to get those 2 on a separate map with a limited population. might also skip the townhall just to make sure that nomads don't spawn (in case its the nomads on the map that break the achievements).


regarding the food situation: farms and orchards can be affected by the weather. if a large part of your food income is from those, you can sometimes get in trouble if snowfall starts too early.

you should probably store up enough food to have at least 1-2 years worth of reserve. if your guys eat 100k per year, you should have at least 200k reserve so even if your farmers let their crops rot for one year because you're capped, the stored food will get you through the next year and then the farmers will fill up the now half empty buffer with their full harvest.

i guess when the town gets too large, there will always be a lot of ineffciency. you can have up to 12 vendors in each market, though. if your stuff isn't distributed fast enough, i guess ramping up the number of vendors isn't a bad idea.

and it's always a good idea to overproduce some valuable stuff (like warm clothes or alcohol or firewood) and have a bunch of tradeposts that will buy iron and coal automatically (and maybe also stone if you're still expanding). i find it easer to overproduce renewable (infinte) resources and buy the non-renewable stuff than to rely on quarries and mines that will eventually run out.