How to rapidly increase the population?

[Shin_147]

Hello everyone, I just downloaded this game today, and have been playing for 3 hours. i have a question is there any way to increase the population fast, i build a lot of buildings but not enough people to work

[rolomena5]

From my experience, you have to build your kingdom in a progressive step by step way kind of way at the start. Just building homes won't be enough because you need to have food for all the new people etc or they will just starve. When you have a good sized population with a balanced food and happiness, you can easily collect taxes and have a town square. You use your money(coins) for a festival. A festival will increase the amount of peoplevisiting your town and rapidly fill the empty homes you have built.

[YetiChow]

The trick, weirdly enough (and this applies to all games in this genre and similar genres where you build up a town/settlement/kingdom/etc) is to not do too many jobs/builds at once. Start off with a number of jobs that your initial number of peasants can actually complete. Your first project should be 1 house, 1 farm, cut a few trees and build a couple (no more than 5!) segments of road -- they don't even need to connect together, just enough to expand your build area. Then, build another house and another farm, cut a few more trees, build your first quarry and then think about a stockpile, well, a few more houses, and a granary. By year 1 you'll only have doubled your population to 10, but by year 5 you should be approaching 50-75 people and things will rapidly speed up from there.

The other trick is timing -- build your new stuff in winter when the farmers aren't busy in the fields, and when the harvesting is finished. You can even turn off woodcutting jobs during harvest season to make sure that all your food is stored in time before winter ruins it.

Once you have stone, the first thing you'll build is a tax collector, and as soon as you get money you'll want to start building things like a baker, maybe a windmill, a market, a dock -- buildings that either a) raise the output of existing buildings (so you don't need as many workers to provide more food! Each windmill, for example, provides +2 food in up to 8 farms around it, so even though a windmill requires 4 workers it's producing up to 16 extra food so it's 2x as efficient as just building an extra 8 farms); or b) give you access to "advanced" features like trade, higher house happiness (which lets you raise taxes without causing issues), etc.

Once you have enough to build a town square and run a festival (remember, you'll need at least 1 event planner and 50g to run a festival), you can do a "build a lot of houses, throw a festival, worry about the food later" move to grow your town rapidly -- if you have some food in storage already, then you should have heaps of time to use those new workers to get farms up and running quickly. Remember though, still plan your new builds based on the number of people available! If you have everyone working on building new farms, or farming said new farms, then nothing else gets done and that massive rush of immigrants will overload your taverns and libraries and whatever else which will start a cascade of issues.