I lose due to no one having kids everytime

[digimortal81]

I need some strategy tips or insight here because I can easily maintain a population of around 25 or so that replenishes the population or I can get it to shoot up to 35-40 then no one has kids and eventually I dwindle down to one family or worker. Resource gathering and food is easy to manage but its keeping the kids coming along, I have tried the build a house every 4 turns and evict mechanic by destroying the structures then reclaiming and i can get a kid out of that eventually but I can never get the child bearing age townsfolk to shack up. There has to a be a way to tell when it is good to build or not.

also is ther any point to growing any type of crop or farming over another? likeone yield more or is it just to have a variety to trade with?

[digimortal81]

should i build a house very year to make sure the right people shack up?

[Axz]

I build a new (small) residential district for every generation, about 8 stone houses.
Just be ready to keep up with food demand, it sneaks up on you.

EDIT: About 2 generations ago I was roughly 51 / 9 / 14, I play mostly in fast forward so 5 min's later I looked back and it was 91 / 24 / 19 and stored food had dropped from 5k+ to less than 100 haha.

[Triggerhippy]

You only should have 2 adults per house, and then they will have kids. They don't make babies if there is no privacy :)

Watch the numbers of students and assume they will become adults soon, so be building houses for them to move into. E.g if your current population is say 20/8/6 then you have 10 houses for the 20 adults and be looking to build another 4 for those students to move into as soon as they come of age.

Another possible problem is that if you were not doing this from the start then your adults might now be too old to have children, in which case you're doomed. This is why it's important to be building houses for students in preperation.

[Kaos]

I hope in the future he will make an old folks home or something so that the survival of your town does not require expanding all the time.

Also for crop type it's not only for trading but also because your citizens want food variations.

[MaseyMase]

I dont know how/why the house building strategy hasnt worked for you, i build around 2/3 houses every year (in my 15th year) after around the 8th year when I have reliable food income. It has never failed before. Even once i built a new house, and one single male moved in and a child was born. It worked so well it defeated both logic and biology.
Perhaps start a new game, it may be bugged? Other than that I have no idea why building houses isnt working for you buddy.

[digimortal81]

ok thx everyone im gonna start a new town setup with this advice. I also have to explain to my 2 yr old why i have a farm with no cows. i tell her the trader has not come yet. she says thats silly, I told her you are exactly right.

[kevinshow]

I guess a tip is that you don't need to remove the house. Leave it up because as old people die, the young people will move in. They'll have kids also.

And even if you don't think you need to have more houses, but when you do make a house, you'll find some young people were married, and they'll move into that house. Then out comes a baby.

This is how to keep the population growing.

[Jirki88]

What this game needs is a way for you to actually marry people, or reassign them between houses. Because as it stands it's just... stupid, really.

[Greenwillow]

Set up a town hall. It is one of the best buildings. Read the town statistics and make sure you have more houses than families. When you have more families than houses they move in together and stop making babies. Every family needs its own house to grow.

[Grizz]

Town Hall + 2 or 4 houses a year does the trick for me. Even if the town goes dry, nomads might come and give you a mutch needed boost thanks to the Town Hall.

But you need to take your time in the beginning, because if you are like me and on the edge of 200+ people. Things get fast paced and hard to keep up with,
Because I did not organize appropriatley everything was sporatic and took too long for my workers to access.

As someone said earlier, making a residential area sounds liek a good idea.

[Grizz]

Oh yah, and when your herded animal fills the space. Make another space and then split the herd, it adds more resource production and jobs.

ALSO

I realized today that Laborers vs Builders vs Farmers in the winter occasionally go idle. They are useless at that point. So having a mine or having the farmers build when winter comes (if there is no crop that can sustain the weather, crops go dead at about 35 degrees)
When they go idle they don't contribute, and they appear to eat more!!!

Just a thought to keep them busy with hunting or building more houses in the winter. When winter comes I make them build a little more while hunting/gathering.

[MaseyMase]

Originally posted by Jirki88:

What this game needs is a way for you to actually marry people, or reassign them between houses. Because as it stands it's just... stupid, really.

It seems to work though, I also love how houses will prioritise nearby occupations (e.g building a house near a farm, the farmer move in to live there) which increases the efficiency of the workers. I places houses all around for that very reason it seems to work well.

[rubycando]

I'm currently working on a food guide (massive :) explaining, besides food issues in this game, many game concepts. Here is an excerpt regarding growth (population management)

GROWTH MANAGEMENT:
By far the hardest concept to grasp. There are no fixed numbers, its all about flow, rhythm. To find it you will have to play a lot, watch, learn, adapt.

Every year your citizens above age 20 and under age 40 has a chance to have a baby if housed and with a spouse, while above 40, observations (verified) indicate they will stop having babies, but they continue to work. Education plays a huge role in your population growth, uneducated citizens die somewhere between age 45 and 60 on average, while educated people can live as long as 80+ (still working even at that age). We don't know, and have no accurate or reliable way of collecting data yet, as to what factors may play a role in the average lifespan of a citizen (average health during that period? etc). If you have accurate data I would appreciate any help you can lend on this!

Children will reach the age of 10, when they become adults, than will either start working as uneducated, if no schools exists or no school has a free spot to educate him/her, or will start getting an education (they count as adults with a "get educated" kind of job and appear as students in town info panel). With education or not every new adult starts as a laborer.

Each home can hold 5 people regardless of age, but the first 2 adults (workers or students) will form a family. Only families with their own home can have babies, no boarding house shortcuts here. Once a family occupies a home, no other adult can form a family in that house, they need to move out and form their own family in a new house. A new family will have a baby usually the first or second year together and at minimum 20 years of age, and they can have a maximum of 3 children in their life (rarely, the average is 2). It's possible a spouse has 40+ age and that leads to families not having babies even though the other spouse still has an appropriate age. Reshuffle your population if the number of homes in this situation is too high, mark the houses for demolition, than cancel it. This forces the AI to reassign partners with priority to child capable families, and any existing couple may be broken or reformed. Since you want your population to keep on producing babies to replace those who die, you need to constantly add more homes for young couples. The number of houses you add should match growth.

Managing growth refers to the management of ratios between old (40+), young (20-40), students and children and the number of houses you have/add. The number of people your city increases with each year is not a direct measure of town growth, but rather a simple sign you have temporary positive growth. Temporary because a month later a large number or old people may pass away, dropping your overall populations numbers, sometimes by a huge amount, and this IS a sign of poor growth management. You want small and steady growth, and this is how you determine the number of houses and the adjustments to your economy to support the population.

It takes effort, patience, experimentation and lots of maps played to get the knowledge and experience needed to manage this game system right. To much growth and economy might collapse, you may get mass death due to starvation or freezing, etc. To little growth and you may loose a wave of old people, diminishing your numbers to unrecoverable levels (its a very rare case believe it or not, you can actually recover from most "near ghost town" situations, but that comes with experience).

The town hall building is INVALUABLE in dealing with growth management. The graphs it provides will help you understand growth better than 1000 words. Smooth and steady growing is perfect, spikes are very bad.

The ultimate factor in Growth however, is your desire. YOU control the growth and YOU decide how much is enough, etc.
I found this out (the hard way) by watching my girlfriend play Banished. On a new map she started to "grow people" like crazy, she was making tons of food and other goods (Excess) and of course I had to say something about it. Her answer:

"First. You're moving into the dog house for treating me like that. Second. Disasters are on so I don't know how much time I have until my first tornado, so f*** proper growth, I'm splitting my town asap. I want them to survive!". It wasn't easy, but she made it. Her town is fine, the strategy worked (over time she fixed all imbalances), the tornadoes did hit, and her town survived.

Update 1. I have to sleep with Dixie (our dog) in my arms, so space it's a bit tight, but she likes it, and i don't eat her bones, so we are still good friends.
Update 2. Space problem solved. Now Dixie sleeps in my bed and I sleep on the couch in her place. I'm learning to make sandwiches, and as soon as the tornado is at work, I'll start a new farm in a box in the balcony to diversify my diet. Dixie tried to help my farm grow faster so she "watered" it. I think she likes Joy more than me.
(The previous story is based on actual facts. The names of the people and animals involved were changed to protect their privacy. I'm still not gonna eat the beans I grow in my balcony!)

So yes you can use excess and growth creatively, depending on circumstances and your goals, but in general the con's far outweigh the pro's.
I explained the GROWTH concept to the best of my ability, hopefully you will find it useful.

[digimortal81]

hey everyone thanks for the great suggestions I got my town growing and making babies now due to all the input. Town hall is invaluable for the help but it is flying now. i think i am at 42/4/10 for population now, i almost never got near 30 before.

[kevinshow]

Houses seem to get reassigned automatically. I notice it when both the man and woman living there die off, and when wood houses are upgraded (the same people don't move back in necessarily), and when making new houses near a certain area, people will shift around. In general, the game does seem like it is trying to match up workers with houses near their job site.