Population cap?

[DB]

My city seems to stop growing after i have 700 people. Even if some die off, no more new refugees show up.

[Will]

Im not sure about the cap in story modes but people you can rescue always show up on the map in endless so far.

[Cougarific]

Yah I went through 3 more storms after hitting ~700 (I was at like 681) and found no new refugees offering to join us.

[PhailRaptor]

It is a point of contention. The Devs seem to think it's critically important to restrict the maximum number of survivors you can round up in Endless. Players generally don't have a problem with such a limit existing, but are very much against the piddly number of merely 700, especially on the Flatlands where you could easily support upwards of 2,000 people with all the space available.

There also appears to be a second limit, in that after the first 3rd Storm goes by on Endless, you will not locate any additional survivors no matter what your population is. The idea being that anyone not in your city has perished. Again, it makes sense in theory, but in practice it seems to be underdoing it.

[Shining Hector]

Ugh, seriously? Guess that rules out ever taking Dueling Law or Triage, then. :P

[gigamoi]

I can easily do more than 700 even in smaller maps. This limit is disapointing to say the least!

[jvp]

I did a bit of testing while chasing the Full House Achievement (city of 700, serenity mode), my conclusion: If you have 600+ people when a storm resets the exploration points, then no points with survivors is generated... (Difficulty settings and endurance mode might also result in no survivors after a storm, but the 600 seems to be a hard cap)

What I did was I had an easy serenity game saved a few days before the 2nd storm, at that point I had 610 people, after the storm no survivors was found. Reloaded and sacrficed my 3 scout teams so I now had 595 people, waited out the storm and found 2 quite large groups resulting in 784 total...

[Malagon]

Yea, it's my biggest gripe with Endless Mode. A real downer.

[Whysoserious]

I'm 99% sure this is because of the poor optimization.

At ~600 pop, when they all go to work, I get FPS issues.
The game would be unplayable if it went up to 1k pop.
They chose graphic fidelity over optimization and the game really does look great.
It has REALLY poor optimization though, especially on lower end pc's even with everything turned to the lowest settings.

[PhailRaptor]

So once again, lazy game design emerges victorious...

[GameMaster]

Originally posted by PhailRaptor:

So once again, lazy game design emerges victorious...

Nope, it's called engine considerations. The engine is the probelm and not lazy game design. The game is having problems with rendering as much as we have already as it is.

[Montana]

Originally posted by jvp:

I did a bit of testing while chasing the Full House Achievement (city of 700, serenity mode), my conclusion: If you have 600+ people when a storm resets the exploration points, then no points with survivors is generated... (Difficulty settings and endurance mode might also result in no survivors after a storm, but the 600 seems to be a hard cap)

What I did was I had an easy serenity game saved a few days before the 2nd storm, at that point I had 610 people, after the storm no survivors was found. Reloaded and sacrficed my 3 scout teams so I now had 595 people, waited out the storm and found 2 quite large groups resulting in 784 total...

I can confirm this.

I didn't find any survivors as long as I was over 600. Then, after reading this, I started killing off teams, I implemented the final tier of Order (and that killed another 2 dozen people), so I slipped under 600 pop. Then, after the next storm, my scouts found over 170 folks in the wild. That was after day 110. Suddenly I had 777.

[Shining Hector]

Well, that's good news. Dueling Law and New Order/Faith got a lot more viable. Also one more reason to get Child Labor, otherwise you're just going to keep gaining idle kids as adults are the only ones able to have "accidents".

[Cipriot]

Well i'm a bit late to the party but I just started playing this game 3 days ago and after some research while playing it : can't seem to get past 789 ppl no matter what i do , reached day 130 on Flats , had 750+ couple times then reduced it to 599 before the storm then i'm constantly hitting 789 no matter what after scouting everything.
https://ibb.co/z2L61J7

[GameMaster]

Originally posted by Chipster:

Well i'm a bit late to the party but I just started playing this game 3 days ago and after some research while playing it : can't seem to get past 789 ppl no matter what i do , reached day 130 on Flats , had 750+ couple times then reduced it to 599 before the storm then i'm constantly hitting 789 no matter what after scouting everything.
https://ibb.co/z2L61J7

This is something that the Devs purposely done to ensure that the game engine won't crash and burn.

It is already doing so because there are too many buildings on a map, by the time you get past 700, your machine will start lagging. 1k will simply cause the engine to collapse, or at least that is implied by the Devs.

[Xaneorath]

Hm. Still quite silly how the achievements are scaled then, if you want to grab achievements with your endless run. I sure wasted some time between those last few storms, checking for a few more survivors (Im at 634) for those last two Achievements which I am missing.
Reading now, after spending way too much time on this, that I have to inform myself about the pop cap and then have to screw around with intentionaly killing off my scout teams to get those last two achievements sounds ... very underwhelming. Especialy since Im playing on Extreme and I doubt Ill find 100 people on the first attempt...

I dont mind if they have to cap it, but they really should keep the achievements at that cap, so anyone can achieve them by playing the game, without having to get extra information from outside...