160-180 people - starving

[bics]

anybody else having problems with populations of 160-180 starting to die?
workload is highest in autmn at 150-60% .. which doesnt seem toooo much for me. but then in one year they die like flies..starving.. drop to 100 people .. and than its lost.

[Nevasith]

A wild guess - you are having plenty of grain and very little bread - check your bread production limit, flour production limit and number of mortars - I had too few mortars and didn't have the water mill tech available yet - more mortars and bread liit to 50% solved the problem

[bics]

i have nothing. i come to a point where people just eat everything. then start starving. then i get problems with the workload and its done.

but before that point i am fully teched up. have steel tools. enough to eat. all different foods and animals. everthing a little bit with around 140-150 people ... all walled in with enough houses fpr more people... and then everything collapses.

[Nevasith]

strange... You do have crops and sickles to gather them? Enough granaries to store all the grain/flour/bread?

[SpazeGoat]

150%-160% workload is pretty grueling; especially for 150+ pop. Some tasks will expire before they can even be completed. I'd try cutting limits to 10-20 on most things and reducing non-essential tasks. Anything over 120% for extended periods will likely produce a long queue. I've found that grain and straw collection is greatly increased when workload is under 80%.

[Pach]

Tips/comments from someone who got the 200 population achievement... feel free to ignore the parts of this you already have covered; I'm just tossing out thoughts/possible reasons:

If you run people at 150% workload, you *must* have downtime between, where they are lower (50% or lower) to balance out the load. If you don't have part of the season where the load is lower, you have too much farming going on. Remove some of your crop fields! I know that sounds counter-intuitive, but...

...You cannot feed your people on crops alone:

1. They get unhappy faster doing repetative, boring tasks, like planting and harvesting crops.
2. They need a variety of food to avoid diseases: meat/vegetables/grain (possibly fish separate as well)

You said you have steel tools: at what percentage of the population? the more tools you have, the more people can farm the crops, and get them in faster. I usually set this to 75% (or higher). Make sure you get rid of the lower tier tools (trade them to the vendor for something else you need). They count towards the percentage. While you people will grab the best tool possible when they go to do that task, if you have lower tier tools, you will stop making the good ones once the percentage is met, and they will be forced to use the less-efficient tools. e.g. if you have 150 people, and you have the sickles set to 50%, once you have 75 sickles of ANY TYPE, they stop. So you might have 10 steel ones, 15 iron ones, and the rest lower tier, which aren't as effective! Trade off the lower ones, and make sure they are only crafting the steel ones, and this will improve farming efficiency.

Do they have food when they are starving? If so, you have them at too high a workload. Especially if you have set "high priority" tasks: they will litterally ignore themselves to do those tasks! So if you have the crops all set high priority, and you have little or no downtime at the end of the season, they will work themselves to death (literally): they finish planting the pulses right at the end of winter, and now it's spring and we have to go plant the grains, and finish THAT right at the end of spring, now we have to harvest the pulses, and finish right before the end of summer.... etc. They have to have time to convert the grown plants into food, rest, pray, etc.

Are the crops very far from the village? If so, they are starving before they get back to town after working the field. While I gather some people have made "satellite" villages, it takes a lot of micromanagement to do, as the people will want to go back to the main village. Keep your farms just on the outskirts of town, and don't try to spread all over the map.

Are you trying to feed them on crops alone? People still need MEAT. Make sure you still have fish and meat available. While having a stable of animals will help with this (don't forget to set a max # on the animals, so they automatically cull the herd and harvest the meat for you), you still need to HUNT. I hunt in spring/summer, after the crops are done (again, you have to have down-time...). This also gives them variety of things to do, and won't be so miserable.

Speaking of being miserable, do you have beer? If they are doing nothing but farming, they get unhappy. Unhappy people don't do anything as fast. So they may be slow going to the field, harvesting the crop, and then coming back slow... and starving before they get back. The hunger icon may also be masked by the sad one. Beer makes them happy. I had 2 breweries going to get the achievement, but you may need more if your people are that miserable. (1 brewery is very effective!)

As someone else said, check to make sure you have enough grinding and cooking production. While one mortar and hearth are enough initially, I later upgrade to 5 of each (and get the knowledge points for doing those). Once you have the mills and bakeries, I usually do 2 of each, to make sure production is up enough. Keep an eye on your flour/bread numbers. if they trend downwards, you need more production!

Also, what do you have the flour and bread production maxes set to? the default is very low (10 or 20). That's nowhere NEAR enough for a large population. I usually up them to 50/100 at some point. If they are still set low, when the people are done planting or harvesting, you don't have enough food in storage to feed all the hungry farmers when they come in after a hard days's work (all at once!). Now, they have to make BREAD before they can eat, and it takes time to grind it up and cook it. They can starve before it's finished. Make sure you have enough in the graineries to feed a bunch of people as soon as they come in from the fields. Once they have eaten, and you are in the "downtime" period, they will make more for the rest of the people coming in.

Hope something I list here helps you! Good luck!

[bics]

Thanks man! you did a nice work.
Especially the intro ;)

in fact i do everything you say. so it must be the workload.
i have a long shaped town. no satellites.
i even have 4 breweries, all different kind of foods... (even if its hard to get fish...i only fish on 4 "double spots" with 3-4 people each.) sell my old tools, have high percentage on food and tools, and low numbers on unimportant items.. tannin, etc.

so it really must be the workload.
in autumn they start with a workload of 160-170 and end around 100%
all the other seasons they maybe start around 110% and end with around 70-80% i guess.
not hundert percent sure about the numbers, but -+10

if thats too high i will try to delete crops ...
maybe i get then enough food for my people and animals.

[Pach]

Glad to be of some help. Here's hoping I can help more... I would really like to see you get the achievement, since you are so close!

Okay, from what you just said, it's probably workload.

One thing you didn't mention, and just checking: where is your bread and flour maxes set to? You need to have these high enough that if people all come at once, they get fed. I had them at 100 to get the achievement. Even if I had most of the population come in at once, they had food as soon as they came in.

So, workload fixes... yes, your numbers are pretty high. I try to stay under 160 at the start of season, and I often let it drop all the way down to 30 or 40 towards the end of the season. Your villagers like to have time to be idle and enjoy nature a bit! ;)

When your workload gets too high for too long, the people get over-stressed, and can make bad choices about what to do next. (this is actually in the in-game help on workload). I witnessed this in one game: my people refused to harvest the crops. AT ALL. Even though they were set "high priority". Not one single crop was harvested that year. We hunted a lot, and I re-adjusted the fields that winter. Edit: I think the workload was over 200 that season.

I think this happens, or is more likely to happen over 150: I've noticed over 150, things get a bit scatterbrained.

Also, look not just at that number but at what is actually queued up next as the things to do. This is hard to explain. There's 50 million little things they do "when available": milk the cows/goats, sheer the sheep, cull your herds. If you see they are taking a while to do these things, instead of rather quickly... their workload is too high. Or if as soon as they get out of the fields, they go right to the mines (more rough work!) Also, if that queue is "long". The workload may still be a lower number, because the tasks aren't so critical, but that stuff doesn't get done. If it's too high, they leave crops laying in the fields, and stuff from traders lying on the ground, etc. If they are leaving straw in the fields, they need more downtime.

So you may need to back off a few fields. You don't want to back off too many at once, or you will have the same problem for a more obvious reason. :) (although you can always revert to hunting to get more meat to feed people).

One thing you may want to do, is re-balance WHICH crops you plant in the grain category. Each grain crop has a special thing it does. The pulses do not have this feature, so just make sure you have those in variety, with enough that you have a small surplus before you harvest each summer.

For example, barley has a chance to produce extra STRAW. So I tend to plant more barley, as it will provide more feed for the animals. I keep the straw graph up on my screen, as well as food, to monitor and make sure I'm planting enough.

Rye and another one (I forget which), produce more GRAIN.

If you plant more of the ones that have your biggest need, you need less fields.

So, for example, if you are planting 50 million fields because you need straw for your herds... change a field to barley. If you need more grain, change one to rye or the other.

Rye is a preferred crop, because it produces a bit more grain, and is also more disease resistant (there is a reason it's the LAST one you learn!)

Now, you still want to plant the other types, so one year of disease doesn't wipe everything out! But if you weight your fields a bit more heavily with barley and the extra-grain producers (rye and the other), you can drop a field or two without losing food.

Also, how much FLAX are you planting? I set my grain fields high-priority, but leave the flax at "normal", and have just enough fields to cover my needs and have a bit of a surplus.

If you have a huge stockpile of flax, you can trim those fields down--don't get rid of them completely, as you will need them to replace broken tools like bows and clothes, but if your villagers are stressing out in the fall, backing off the flax can help.

Final note: herd size. How many of each animal do you have? If you have a lot of animals that's a double whammy for workload: you need more straw (and therefore more crops) to feed them, PLUS the workload of feeding/water carting to them/milking/shearing/culling/harvesting. So the bigger the herd, the greater the workload buildup.

If I remember right, my herd counts were something like this:

Goats: 0. I skip them completely.
Sheep: I initially go for 10, and at some point had to up to 15 to keep enough wool for winter clothes. Anything above that is overkill. As long as you have enough wool coats, you have enough sheep.
Pigs: start 10, built up to 20 or 25. BACON FOR EVERYONE!
Cattle: start 10, built up to 20 or 25. This was more for hides, but I had plenty of milk (it was going bad). I needed the hide for carts/sledges
Donkey: I start with 15, build to 20 or 25, and replace later with horses, although I don't know if there is a difference between them (I can't find one).
Horses: see note for donkey.

IMPORTANT: ALWAYS have enough carts for *all* your donkeys and horses (even the young ones)! They do not need shelter or food while hooked to a cart in winter, so you don't have to feed them if they are working (that's kind of backwards, isn't it?)

You can theoretically have 100 horses, and not have to feed any, if you can keep up 100 carts! (good luck doing that, though!)

So take a good look at your herd as well as your crops: if you have tons of crops to feed your massive herd, the crops aren't really the problem...

Hope this helps... please share the screenshot (or your achievements link) when you get the 200 pop achievement! I have my fingers crossed for you!

[Aieonae]

Disgress, something might be related.

I had a moment of scare yesterday.

The folks just tanks there at one of harvest season.

They totally ignoring healthy harvesting grain for that season... at a workload of 80%.

I thought it might be because straw capacity causing the mayhem as all my haystacks are full then.

I did eventually build more haystacks they did recover from it but it sure was scary.

I dont know if a full haystack can cause this as my previous games they did not stockpile that much it usually just burns in stable.

[bics]

Ok i reached it now.
200 warriors.
Workload was the key.
Also the charts helped a lot and growing slow also helped.
Achieved the 100 neolithic quest. (Eventhough I did not actually get it)

Thanks a lot for the help!

[Pach]

Congratulations, bics! Glad you finally got the 200 people achievement!

[Ghostlight]

Originally posted by Pach:

People still need MEAT. Make sure you still have fish and meat available. While having a stable of animals will help with this (don't forget to set a max # on the animals, so they automatically cull the herd and harvest the meat for you), you still need to HUNT.

I have 190 pop and 120 animals and no need to hunt*. I had one blip at 180 where my Meat dropped to 50 (from 300) for no reason but it seems to have recovered and now sits at 400.

* Except to kill those far off Bears that murder my Megalith parties.

Originally posted by Pach:

Sheep: I initially go for 10, and at some point had to up to 15 to keep enough wool for winter clothes. Anything above that is overkill. As long as you have enough wool coats, you have enough sheep.

Disagree. Late game when all the stuff you got used to trading away is now worth only 1, Wool is your standard trader commodity. I run 50 sheep and sit on 250 - 300 Wool.