Minimum sustainable town size?

[joefitts63]

Been wondering about this. Is there a point where you can just say, "Nope, not growing any more. No more new houses."

How many houses do you need in place to have enough people dieing off to allow couples to move into housing before they are too old to reproduce? Anyone done any experimenting along these lines?

[Erikwa3290]

i've been able to keep a pop of about 1200 +/- with about 400 homes, problem comes when you get too many old single people taking up houses and being bad for the economy in general.

[sbg137]

Check the other topics recently. I remember reading a few weeks back about someone who said they play that exact way and they get to a point where they dont need to build any more houses as they balance the die-off rate in sync with the birth rate.

Never been able to do that myself, must be a pretty good strategy they have, hopefully he/she will see your question and comment.

[mbutton15]

I suspect it's easier to achieve with larger populations. You will have a set number of jobs and the trick to self-sustaining will be to make sure you never reach 0 labourers. The moment you reach 0 then any more deaths will mean jobs don't get replaced. So the larger a population the bigger the labour reserve will be.

On my old (lower spec) PC I used to stop building around 600 population, to avoid game lag, and the game would settle into a 650-950 population cycle.

[Erikwa3290]

my 1200 pop village has reached the stable point I think.
I trimmed the houses back a little to 380ish.
thanks to firewood trading for food and good farming I have around 100 works at any given time.
also, in case it matters I focused on mass stocking everything to hold the town over during any population booms and disasters.
300,000 food
20,000 wood
50,000 firewood
5000+ stone/iron
10,000 tools
5000 clothes
needless to say it took allot of storage barns and supply plots
I left it alone for 2 days straight and its still about 1200. (only 10fps at X10) lol
waiting for my 200year+ achievement now :)

[hurepoix]

Problem at banished is people have a too long live expectancy. Result is house are occupied by old peoples, and young generation cant found familly because of lack of houses. On a long cycle population become older and older, at the same time children become rare. At the end your population can be cut by perhaps 3, with consequence you can imagine on abandonated crops and industry, shortage of food and tools ect ....

So unless there is a mod that fix life expectancy to more realistic data for a medievial / pre industrial era, having a stable colony is at this time utopic. Actual situation is a simulation where you play about at medievial time, with a life expectancy of a modern rich country. It result a perpetual flight foward for more house, until it become impossible, simply because there is no more space.

For your question, if you wnat an other answer, the solution would be to have, at peek, about a 2/3 of your total population occupied as workers/unproductives laborers. At time population felt farmers, miners ect would be replaced by workers untils after a down period, population growth again. However I m not sure it s possible to feed so much unproductive peoples.

[mturn88]

Originally posted by Erikwa3290:

i've been able to keep a pop of about 1200 +/- with about 400 homes, problem comes when you get too many old single people taking up houses and being bad for the economy in general.

Is there a way to regulate the amount of old single people in homes? I've moved slowly up to 100 and have not seen this problem so far. Would be good to prepare for it as the population expands. (New to the game so apologies if it's a dumb question.)

[hurepoix]

Aktion T4 hospital mods could work, I presume.

[ROFLpl0x]

Originally posted by mturn88:

Originally posted by Erikwa3290:

i've been able to keep a pop of about 1200 +/- with about 400 homes, problem comes when you get too many old single people taking up houses and being bad for the economy in general.

Is there a way to regulate the amount of old single people in homes? I've moved slowly up to 100 and have not seen this problem so far. Would be good to prepare for it as the population expands. (New to the game so apologies if it's a dumb question.)

You can kick old people out of their house by marking it for demolition and then reclaiming it. That will kick the old person either into a boarding house or into another house with a single person of the opposite sex. They may or may not move right back in if they go into a boarding house but they will stay in any existing house they move into that has another single person already in it. You may have to demo/reclaim the house several times to get them to stop trying to move back in, though.

Also, single old people living in houses will usually regulate themselves, automatically moving into a house with another single old person of the opposite sex and a new couple will then take over the empty house. With a large population and frequent old age deaths this will happen all over the map without you even realizing it. There are times when they won't do it themselves and it may have something to do with their proximity to each other, their jobs or you just need to give them more time but a kick out almost always puts them together.

For the record, it isn't a dumb question. There's plenty of seasoned players that don't know this happens either and there's no obvious indication that it does.

In any case, it does seem helpful to wait until they're no longer homeless and the house has zero inventory before reclaiming it. It's probably also helpful to wait until they've been away long enough to be unassigned from whatever job they had close to that house.

[Erikwa3290]

Originally posted by Whack!:

Originally posted by mturn88:

Is there a way to regulate the amount of old single people in homes? I've moved slowly up to 100 and have not seen this problem so far. Would be good to prepare for it as the population expands. (New to the game so apologies if it's a dumb question.)

You can kick old people out of their house by marking it for demolition and then reclaiming it. That will kick the old person either into a boarding house or into another house with a single person of the opposite sex. They may or may not move right back in if they go into a boarding house but they will stay in any existing house they move into that has another single person already in it. You may have to demo/reclaim the house several times to get them to stop trying to move back in, though.

Also, single old people living in houses will usually regulate themselves, automatically moving into a house with another single old person of the opposite sex and a new couple will then take over the empty house. With a large population and frequent old age deaths this will happen all over the map without you even realizing it. There are times when they won't do it themselves and it may have something to do with their proximity to each other, their jobs or you just need to give them more time but a kick out almost always puts them together.

For the record, it isn't a dumb question. There's plenty of seasoned players that don't know this happens either and there's no obvious indication that it does.

In any case, it does seem helpful to wait until they're no longer homeless and the house has zero inventory before reclaiming it. It's probably also helpful to wait until they've been away long enough to be unassigned from whatever job they had close to that house.

what he said, lol
a side note, keep track o Homes and Families in the town hall, this can help you notice old people creep or even a potential population boom leading to snowballing starve fests.

[ROFLpl0x]

Originally posted by Erikwa3290:

... old people creep...

That's a good one!

[Xuhybrid]

I think this number is around 30-50 where you have enough pop for food production AND resource/tool production

[Rynea]

Originally posted by Xuhybrid:

I think this number is around 30-50 where you have enough pop for food production AND resource/tool production

I can agree with that. Once you are over the first 'drop' from the first generation passing away, which can be rather drastic, you can usually get a stable population with that number. The more villagers you have working in quarries, which have a high risk of someone getting killed by rocks, the higher that number will likely have to be.

Personally I dislike mines and quarries and never build them as they are not persistent enough for my playstyle on top of being extremely inefficient. I prefer 1-2 trading posts early on and some extra firewood production, which guarantees a stable income with the firewood trade for iron/stone/coal/wool

Other than that, some food production, a herbalist, school, blacksmith, tailor, some foresters a church and hospital is really all you need to get stable.

While fields, orchards and pastures, mines and quarries are a nice extra sometimes that increases quality of life, they are not necessary at all.

[mturn88]

Originally posted by Whack!:

Originally posted by mturn88:

Is there a way to regulate the amount of old single people in homes? I've moved slowly up to 100 and have not seen this problem so far. Would be good to prepare for it as the population expands. (New to the game so apologies if it's a dumb question.)

You can kick old people out of their house by marking it for demolition and then reclaiming it. That will kick the old person either into a boarding house or into another house with a single person of the opposite sex. They may or may not move right back in if they go into a boarding house but they will stay in any existing house they move into that has another single person already in it. You may have to demo/reclaim the house several times to get them to stop trying to move back in, though.

Also, single old people living in houses will usually regulate themselves, automatically moving into a house with another single old person of the opposite sex and a new couple will then take over the empty house. With a large population and frequent old age deaths this will happen all over the map without you even realizing it. There are times when they won't do it themselves and it may have something to do with their proximity to each other, their jobs or you just need to give them more time but a kick out almost always puts them together.

For the record, it isn't a dumb question. There's plenty of seasoned players that don't know this happens either and there's no obvious indication that it does.

In any case, it does seem helpful to wait until they're no longer homeless and the house has zero inventory before reclaiming it. It's probably also helpful to wait until they've been away long enough to be unassigned from whatever job they had close to that house.

Originally posted by Whack!:

Originally posted by mturn88:

Is there a way to regulate the amount of old single people in homes? I've moved slowly up to 100 and have not seen this problem so far. Would be good to prepare for it as the population expands. (New to the game so apologies if it's a dumb question.)

You can kick old people out of their house by marking it for demolition and then reclaiming it. That will kick the old person either into a boarding house or into another house with a single person of the opposite sex. They may or may not move right back in if they go into a boarding house but they will stay in any existing house they move into that has another single person already in it. You may have to demo/reclaim the house several times to get them to stop trying to move back in, though.

Also, single old people living in houses will usually regulate themselves, automatically moving into a house with another single old person of the opposite sex and a new couple will then take over the empty house. With a large population and frequent old age deaths this will happen all over the map without you even realizing it. There are times when they won't do it themselves and it may have something to do with their proximity to each other, their jobs or you just need to give them more time but a kick out almost always puts them together.

For the record, it isn't a dumb question. There's plenty of seasoned players that don't know this happens either and there's no obvious indication that it does.

In any case, it does seem helpful to wait until they're no longer homeless and the house has zero inventory before reclaiming it. It's probably also helpful to wait until they've been away long enough to be unassigned from whatever job they had close to that house.

Thanks for that.
I've started to notice the problem as my population has reached 400 but what you've suggested above has helped maintain it well. Much appreciated!

[Horoai]

That's a very interesting question!

I think 30-50 (but more towards the 30) is a good guess. However, you have to keep in mind that you can only at least sort of guarantee 2 workers per house. So in order to fill 30 jobs you'd need 15 houses which on the other hand can potentially give you a population of 75+. So all of a sudden, you'd need more food and more jobs.

At the same time, your population may drop below 30 at times due to the housing issues discussed above so you'd might want to have some additional buffer population.

Has anyone ever tried balancing this?

[Leips]

I agree with the guess of 30-50 people. At the time I have a population of 65 people and it works quite good. I build up my town with 34 houses. Some times population reaches +100 but then declines again. I'm never under 40 people, which is more then enough to fullfill the basic needs. Shortly after a strong decline (whether because population was old and all old ones died or due to tornados) there are many births, so between the peaks and valleys are about 15-20 years. This depends on the slope. Hard decline is followed by strong increase, if the slope is softer, the ups and downs are softer too.
To be able to fullfill the needs of the people I have a changing number of fields with crops, 2 mines and one quarry as well as 2 foresters and some fishers/hunters/gatherers/herbalists/etc. In peak-times I try to store as much as possible so the populations is able to deal with destruction of tornados and low individual numbers at the same time.

Originally posted by Yggdrasil:

Has anyone ever tried balancing this?

Well with these low numbers I guess you will never come to a perfect stable population. There will always be some ups and downs. I think with time the slope of the ups and downs will become less steep and therefore you will maybe have a difference from +/- 10% of your population. Sadly I could not observe these pattern until now, because
1) tornados killing everyone and therefore creating a strong decline, which is followed by a strong increase -> disturbing "natural" process to reach equilibrium
2) 10x time laps is not fast enough to skip ages in seconds. (by the way, is there a mod for this?)

I hope I could help some of you.
Sorry if I made some language mistakes, I'm no native english speaker :D