A rounding problem with population

[JimMorrison]

thejeff said:
What happens with population decrease?

Is that also the same way, so a population that would drop by less than 10 doesn't drop at all?
Or does the decrease round up, so it drops by 10 every month?

The game I played through as LA Ermor, I found it ridiculously annoying how long the last 10 or 20 people could hold out. Since even Dom 10 doesn't kill 50% a month, so you get these scruffy little hillpeople, eking out an existence from -I don't know what-. I actually started pillaging to try to get them to go away, it was not an easy task to hit 0 pop.


I do agree though, it seems like it would be simple to add a couple of triggers that just add 10 pop to all provinces under Growth, and remove 10 from all under Death. Yes, this would impact smaller provinces slightly more, as hitting 850 for example would suddenly yield 20 people, which is actually something like 2.2% growth.

Though personally I would love to see population shifts due to happiness and such. So incessant blood hunting in a province would start to scare people away for example. Also a really destructive dominion would herald itself to people outside of it. You might actually realize where LA Ermor is, first because of the enormous waves of refugees flooding into your lands.

[PvK]

Does something happen when you reach 0 population as Ashen Ermor, or were you just a perfectionist?

[thejeff]

Unrest goes away, which can be important if you've got gold producing sites.

200% tax on a gold mine could be most of Ermor's income.

[PvK]

Oh, interesting. I noticed unrest drifted down to zero when the population got low, but I hadn't noticed a change at zero - I thought one lost all income at that point. I didn't realize you got more income for killing the last survivors at a mine. I'll have to pay more attention!

[JimMorrison]

Well for me, it was your first guess. It just bugged me terribly that I had some ragged survivors in my otherwise pristine apocalyptic wasteland.

I don't know what they were eating, but it couldn't have been brains, judging by the complaints I was getting from the zombies.....

[Ironhawk]

Yeah it counter-intuitive PvK. You do lose all income from population, but the sites produce gold regardless of pop. You would, in turn, think that taxes would not effect the income from those sites, but it does. Pretty tangled up, really.

[PvK]

Seems like the gold produced by sites is actually scaled by population (when above zero), though, since frequently a province with low population and no unrest produces less gold than its sites add up to at 100% tax.

[Loren]

JimMorrison said:I do agree though, it seems like it would be simple to add a couple of triggers that just add 10 pop to all provinces under Growth, and remove 10 from all under Death. Yes, this would impact smaller provinces slightly more, as hitting 850 for example would suddenly yield 20 people, which is actually something like 2.2% growth.

I'm saying to do this only if the effects of the scale got rounded to zero.

Though personally I would love to see population shifts due to happiness and such. So incessant blood hunting in a province would start to scare people away for example. Also a really destructive dominion would herald itself to people outside of it. You might actually realize where LA Ermor is, first because of the enormous waves of refugees flooding into your lands.

Yes, I have been thinking something along these lines would be a good idea, also.

Scales, unrest & bad dominions would determine a happiness rating for the province. The greater the happiness difference between a province and it's neighbors and the more people would move. Make LA Ermor's dominion unhappy enough and you could actually get rid of the pop kill effect, just chase them off instead.

Perhaps the pretender's bless would also have an effect. I would think people would prefer to live in a place with a nature bless and certainly wouldn't like a place with a death bless.

[B0rsuk]

PvK said:
Loren wrote: "it just seems so wrong that a depopulated province doesn't ever recover. People would move in!"

Pre-industrial non-nomadic people didn't move very often. As in, peasants generally spend their entire lives within a day or two's walk of where they were born.

True, but
1) non-nomadic people existed. It seems silly to rule out nomadic peoples in early era, at least. And even if you assume a strictly stationary society of late era, there are still
- bandits, outlaws (depopulated areas would be better for a hideout)
- gypsies
- bards
- beggars
- various homeless people. By the way, it wasn't ALL about settlements in medieval ages, at least not in Poland. Owning land meant power - true. Land can't really burn down like a windmill or workshop may. Everyone wanted to own land, but if you couldn't you could still work as a worker on somebody's land. And they wouldn't pay you for sitting idle, so you'd have to move on once the harvest is over. Hopefully someone else would have other crops, or other work to do.

Unlike peasants, townsfolk were technically free to move around. Artisans and guilds in particular would sense an opportunity in being the sole supplier of a small population. No or little competition etc.

2) Even if we assume people don't move at all, there would be more room for everyone who's left. More resources, food, space. So there should be a population boom, just like there typically is after a war. Speaking in ecology terms, there's environment capacity. It works primarily for animals, because humans are able to work around since the Neolithic Revolution (transition from hunters/gatherers to agriculture/livestock ). But humans would still benefit.

Overall, it looks like you're looking for an excuse to justify current mediocrity of growth scale.
I think it's too late to change it now. But it would be sweet if population growth was sort-of inversely proportional to current population size. So a depopulated province should grow much faster provided there's a growth scale. This would both make growth scale more useful and the game more realistic. Win-Win.

[Agrajag]

JimMorrison said:
The game I played through as LA Ermor, I found it ridiculously annoying how long the last 10 or 20 people could hold out. Since even Dom 10 doesn't kill 50% a month, so you get these scruffy little hillpeople, eking out an existence from -I don't know what-. I actually started pillaging to try to get them to go away, it was not an easy task to hit 0 pop.

(IIRC) Raise taxes to 200% and start patrolling, as that kills a fixed amount of population per unrest lowered