Peasant Maxxing

[cats_on_strings]

As we all know, only peasants can reproduce, and through the use magic they are able to morph into all those other population types that you use to run the nation.
But if you convert too many peasants you're gonna fall into a population death spiral of slow growth or stagnation.
Instead, If you want a strong economy and large military this patch, don't fall into the trap of building those nasty stinky buildings that would grow your economy in the early game.

The better choice is to focus on peasant maxxing, building up massive amounts of peasant in the early game so you can steamroll everybody with the massive population you have. You can do this by simply turning off auto builder and instead just build tons of peasant estate buildings when you can. These peasants will also feed into the capitol were you will be building most of the actual infrastructure to run a nation for most of the early game.

This advice will not apply once they update the game and fix the lack of knowledge around the subject of reproduction, only known to the peasants. But for now, peasant maxxing is the way to go.

[cats_on_strings]

I forgot to mention that R.G.O. counts as laborers, and those don't know how to make babies either for some reason, so make sure you have a large peasant population before building up your R.G.O. locations. If you are worried about your peasants starving, have no fear, peasant village buildings raise local food capacity.

[Lux]

But all pops types can grow now with the latest update no?

[cats_on_strings]

Originally posted by Lux Imperia:

But all pops types can grow now with the latest update no?

They did say they changed it, but population growth seems to be just completely broken right now.
I played a game up to 1800 and formed Germany, and the population for all of europe was pretty much the same as it was in 1337, I'm talking about France still having 15 million.

I tried my strategy a few times but keep watching my hard work of raising my population at the expense of everything else fail, all because of the random disease outbreaks constantly killing a bunch of people and stagnating population growth. So feel free to discard my post, since it didn't even work when I was trying to make it work.

I'm just so annoyed right now at how population works right now and was seeing some early success with the peasant strategy.

[Lux]

tbh in my Persia game my population are increasing slowly. My labourers are generally my largest group and they definitely grow just like peasants do. I do agree that diseases do often set me back though. Albeit so far in this game I have gotten fairly lucky compared to my previous European games (only lost 10K to the black death too)

[Nootie the Cutie]

I just do the Bankrupt trick and this helps fund money into anything you want

[cråck]

If you want a strong economy and large military this patch

how you get any sort of income if you only have peasants in your land ?

massive population ... ok... and what you do with these peasants ? raises levies till 1800ish ?

nobles > clerics > burgers are the social classes that create demand for goods, also nobles and burgers are the ones bringing you taxes
without these pop demand your urban buildings make no profit, without lots of hight social classes you collect close to no taxes

as France ( and they have like gazilions bonuses to max tax peasants )
in 1450ish
i have 12M pops, mostly in france region
i make 1130 tax from nobles at 55% rate
only 120 tax from peasants at 78 rate
i have 2 full stack of 36 heavy cav and 1 stack of canons + inf

imo my eco and army can defeat any ai or sort of coalition... despite i wasn't "peasant maxxing"

an other exemple as poland you can urbanise early for cheep, in 20 years as poland just after building few towns my balance income went up from 11-12 to 50-60 ducats

Yes, growth comes from food production, food storage aswell as location rank
But income comes from promoting social classes
This same income you can then spend to expand your military / mercs, meaning your peasants can continue repreduce during wars, while you don't suffer from penalities of " raised levies " in your lands

don't fall into the trap of building those nasty stinky buildings

peasants buildings is exacly what i did as Sweeden
since it's a very rural area, and very much free subject push, i tried to build peasants economy around villages
it simply do not work, the return of investing 1200g early game into villages, brings you no income while incrasing demand for "low profit" industries aka breweries or vine makers
i'm pretty sure making 3 towns insteed and promoting these 400 nobles would have a way stronger impact on the economy

early game if you are "weak", investing into peasants is a trap, both poland and sweeden runs proven me that

[ABoxFullOfKittens]

I assume this relates to why I have a few provinces where I have no peasants.. or 1kish for 7-8kish jobs? When I look at migration everyone is leaving that province. I can't seem to fix it so I just keep inviting settlers to it.

[cats_on_strings]

I don't know why people are posting on this after so long, it's from an older patch when only peasants would reproduce and promote to needed roles. I remember it causing the problem of late game population stagnation that wasn't helped at the time due to aggressive plagues killing all the reproducing pops.