Paleolithic Overpopulation

[bun]

This achievement will be the death of me I swear!
I get to around 70-80 people, have multiple hunt/gather/fish sites, manually organise big hunts like mammoths, rhinos etc (hell, pretty much anything at this point), but the second there's food it seems to be eaten, just gone down from 76 to 50 population over one winter!

Anyone completed this achievement got any tips?

[Hotmelt]

i restricted my population when i got it to your level due to the food running out and they were killing all my livestock.so i demolished houses and kept the population below 50 which i found very manageable.havent had time to keep the pop level higher than that and sustain it at the moment.but i did always buy food from traders using my overstocked furs and that helped.

[Mahzrael]

It helps if you "jump" your population 20% at a time. Example - If i have 40 people, i will wait untill my food, clothing, tools, ect can fully service about 50 people for a year before building more housing. Next, before building more housing,
I will increase the storage limits on water, food, rocks, flint, ore, sticks - pretty much *everything* - and wait 2 years for the stocks to fill up. Ideally you want to hoard up about 50% more than you normally would, and no less than 50% of the new population total.
So if you normally have a max limit of 10 sticks, and your trying to jump from 40 to 50 pop, its best to set the stick limit to 25 and just be super patient while your stocks building up.
When new population comes in they have a lot of needs - having all the materials on hand to meet those needs will prevent "job explosion".

Example of Job explosion - bob joins the camp, and needs a sweater. So bob goes to sew himself a sweater. There is not enough wool , so sally is sent to shear the sheep.
There is not enough animals to provide for the new incomers, including bob, so the sheep limit is increased. There is not enough hay to feed the new sheep, so fields are planted - and while all this is going on, bob has no sweater. Also, while all this is going on, people are focused on making sure bob does not die of hypothermia, which means they are more concerned about sheep and hay than they are about gathering food and water.

Basically, you have to ensure that if 10 people randomly show up, the work load does not suddenly jump to 150%. After you have built up a large hoard of materials, set your limits down lower, so that you use up those materials to build new stuff, but dont waste job slots in the work que trying to maintain those high levels.

[Paraleo]

good answers but the guy is in paleolithic and if you got livestock you are in neolithic so the wall of text isn't helping.

[Mahzrael]

Even in paleo you run into the same issue - but instead of needing domesticated animals for sweaters, you need to hunt live animals for skins to maintain buildings, bone for building materials, leather, ect. The idea is the same - before building a new tent , which will require skins to maintain in a year, stock up on skins before expanding outward.

4 situations to avoid

1) there is no food to get . In this case there is no solution other than to search a wider area, which will cost more time, which means you need to keep your work que low, because people will be traveling long distances on hunts rather than being at home to gather sticks when you need them.

2) There is food to get but your people's focus is divided on other tasks , like picking up flint or sticks. The solution is the same again - lower your work load, and hoard up materials over multiple seasons.

3) your over-using one food source and ignoring others. Walking past all the berry bushes while trying to go on long distance hunts. Solution is to stop using "hunt" work areas, and to hunt manually.

4) Sometimes your people fish or hunt far away, they will only pick up 1 fish or meat, then run home - putting a drying rack or tent closer to the fishing/hunting site will prevent some of the wasted walking. "storage, processing, and rest" outposts.

[Paraleo]

his question is about getting 100 people in paleo which seems to be really difficult and time consuming, I only commented because I was curious about the steps also and the only answers were from people who didn't seem to have the achievement.

[Panterich]

@Mahzrael judging from your first reply you don`t have that achievement (not that your profile settings help). Perhaps you should try it yourself instead of theorycrafting. That is quite different (and long and boring) experience that becomes very hard right before it ends.

Originally posted by Bunbun:

Anyone completed this achievement got any tips?

There is a number of topics with the same name. Use search.

Some starting locations provide somewhat smaller river banks, so more of them will be closer to you. But that is hardly a difference with 100 population. Some locations provide much more nearby berries and fruit. That may be a factor. You expansion (building tents or cutting trees) seems to affects nearby spawning of animals and sticks. In my experience if you have a spot nearby that is regulary rich in animals then you have less animals further away. And if you lose that spot you will have to go much farther away for food and that is not good.

Last years require a LOT of micro to manage hunting.

[buds]

Originally posted by Mahzrael:

It helps if you "jump" your population 20% at a time. Example - If i have 40 people, i will wait untill my food, clothing, tools, ect can fully service about 50 people for a year before building more housing. Next, before building more housing,
I will increase the storage limits on water, food, rocks, flint, ore, sticks - pretty much *everything* - and wait 2 years for the stocks to fill up. Ideally you want to hoard up about 50% more than you normally would, and no less than 50% of the new population total.
So if you normally have a max limit of 10 sticks, and your trying to jump from 40 to 50 pop, its best to set the stick limit to 25 and just be super patient while your stocks building up.
When new population comes in they have a lot of needs - having all the materials on hand to meet those needs will prevent "job explosion".

Example of Job explosion - bob joins the camp, and needs a sweater. So bob goes to sew himself a sweater. There is not enough wool , so sally is sent to shear the sheep.
There is not enough animals to provide for the new incomers, including bob, so the sheep limit is increased. There is not enough hay to feed the new sheep, so fields are planted - and while all this is going on, bob has no sweater. Also, while all this is going on, people are focused on making sure bob does not die of hypothermia, which means they are more concerned about sheep and hay than they are about gathering food and water.

Basically, you have to ensure that if 10 people randomly show up, the work load does not suddenly jump to 150%. After you have built up a large hoard of materials, set your limits down lower, so that you use up those materials to build new stuff, but dont waste job slots in the work que trying to maintain those high levels.

I agree with this. I will use this method since I do a slow and efficient game. I once reached 180 and they starve which is due to reckless over population without the necessary stability on the resources needed to live and work decently.
Though I planned on advancing only when all knowledge are accumulated for all or much needed techs but worried that I can’t hunt all the possible animals that might get extinct when advancing.

[Magna Kaizer]

Dont use hunting zones they are kinda rubbish.
Build lots of totems to grow your prestiege so traders come more often buy all the food every time.
When your population gets up to 80ish start fishing those far away lakes or rivers.

[Kosh]

I did it on Continent Dawn (Hardcore) - thats the 1st mission.

I had troubles to get over 75 popullation. Mainly because I hunt cave bears, mammoths, etc with to few people. When I started to attack these animals with 6-7 people, I didn't lost any of them and my village grow.

I didn't depend that much on the traders food. I used all the berries around and a lot of fishing (5 fishing rods - 5-6 diffrent areas)

But I missplayed some of the years and it took me a while to reach 100 population. The benefit of it was the amount of technology points I got from hunting. When I reached 100 population I had 212 points to spent.

I used maybe 30-50 years on that. But as a guess, I could cut it to 50% of the time, if I would go for the same achivment again.

[janfo]

I think the problem when you take too long is running out of flintstone
I did the achievement, too and yeah you really have to use everything you got around the village. I played on a lake map and fished on 3 different lakes. And its also a bit of luck, I was really unlucky with animals at some point and already wanted to give up until 2 years in a row many mammoths appeared and that was the reason I did it in the end.

[Jdickman89]

Originally posted by janfo:

I think the problem when you take too long is running out of flintstone
I did the achievement, too and yeah you really have to use everything you got around the village. I played on a lake map and fished on 3 different lakes. And its also a bit of luck, I was really unlucky with animals at some point and already wanted to give up until 2 years in a row many mammoths appeared and that was the reason I did it in the end.

Once your main camp is solid, making satellite camps with a few huts, storage shed, wood and stone storage and meat drying racks helped me. Your people are miserable for a little bit, shuffling resources out to get it going, but long term it gives you better access to hunting sites since animals seem to start avoiding you once you start your scorched earth, no-animal-is-inedible policy. This also really helps by adding a lot better/easier fishing coverage so you get meat both ways, and - again - shortens the trips between forage a wider coverage of forage sites. Short term misery over long term success.

[Mahzrael]

I gave this a try in Northlands. The problem is that with paleo technology, your time to harvest things is increased, and the total you can collect at one time is decreased, as compared to other eras. There are no raiders in paleo - so i ended up having to build 4 camps around a lake or river system, each camp having 6 tents, 1 storage , 2 dry racks, 6 skin racks, 3 poles , 3 totems. The 4 camps are spread out enough that tasks like gathering berries or flint do not take a half season to complete ( no joke - i was stuck at 45 pop until i realized that 15 people were spending *half a season* to get one single flint / fish / ect )

I was also totally unable to gather enough skin and meat to grow past 50-60 without building "mini-camps" , even while keeping workload load and welfare high. The flint tools break , gathering more flint becomes a whole mini industry. Once a year i needed to take 5 people to manually walk to a cluster of animals and go on a killing spree - leaving other villagers to follow behind to butcher. If I didnt skill at least ( population / 5 ) animals each spring, i could not continue to make progress ( increase population while also repairing buildings) .

Population is at 80, slowing growing , old people at 15, children at 20, migrants coming in, so now its just a game of patience - mini-camps really helped a lot.

So i acknowledge there is a bit of a trick to this one that wasnt obvious at first :D

[baransu]

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1704975256

hope this helps you guys, it took a while to do lol

[General Malaise]

I finally did it too:

I killed 100 Reindeer on the way, thinking that would get the me the Deerhunter Achievement. Doh.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1705377811

[Don Dno]

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1814008632

Play river fork in europe normal mode
in hardcore u will get wiped by raiders
I built 100+ totems (no idea if it helps)
Harvest all the woods around for berries
Use 8-12 hunters to hunt manually. Keep 100+ meat
Keep 30-50 fish in reserve
Craft clothes, harpoons, tools and slings. Make totems out of bones.
4-5 hrs and
Profit!