Population Question`
 

Does your population grow naturally, or do you need to take at least one growth scale for it to grow?

Re: Population Question`
 

They grow naturally of course, but if you spend points on the growth scale, the pop will grow faster.

Re: Population Question`
 

Was this changed in Dom 3? I remember in Dom 2, with a 0 Growth scale, your population was basically a sitting duck for random events/global spells that depleted it with no way to recover (save rare events that actually added population).

This made Growth 1 necessary for most nations in very long SP games.

Re: Population Question`
 

I do not believe population increases without Growth scale.

Re: Population Question`
 

I don't think it does either. I wish it would.

Re: Population Question`
 

This is stupid, a population should increase naturally, as long as there is no death present or some magical effect. Perhaps this can be reviewed in the future? Different nations should have different natural growth rates, ie...Agartha very low, man high. With growth scale providing an additional bonus.

At the moment, the world seems to depopulate over time, permanent dark ages effect. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/image...es/Injured.gif

The only time u have a increase is with the immigration random event. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/laugh.gif

Re: Population Question`
 

Would you want to stay in a land that's being overrun by multiple violent, megamaniacal self-proclaimed deities and their murderous soldiers, monsters, wizards, and blood hunters? Especially if it's the third time this has happened? And they have a habit of doubling taxes to fund their wars?

Re: Population Question`
 

In times of hardship such as u discribe humans breed more, 8+ children. In times of plenty the evidence is of less children 2.4 children. So the humans in dominions should at least follow this rule, plus some other races as well.

Re: Population Question`
 

I disagree, I don't think it is stupid. I feel like the scales are supposed to reflect the pretender god's influence on the world (Atleast in his/her domain). Just think of a scale set to no growth or death as a population where people have 2 kids per family. This is not terribly uncommon in real life, and it is fairly common for populations nowadays to even have a "death scale" as far as replacing and expanding populations.

Even in the United States we are facing a time period where it is predicted we won't be replacining ourselves in the future (Having more than 1 child per couple).

You mention "natural" and "increase" in the same sentence. In a natural environment, population does not tend to expand, it normally stays the same. What causes a population to increase over time is usually an abnormality from the natural norm, (Predators dying off, weather fluctuations, the invention of agriculture ;P).

Finally, it is important to remember that this is a video game. If it bothers you that not taking a growth scale does not increase your population, start taking atleast growth scale 1. With the new sleeping pretenders, its not that hard to squeeze it in.

Re: Population Question`
 

Well, throughout earth history population growth trend has been upwards for a very long time. Having an ambient growthrate of 0.1% or 0.2% propably wouldn't boither anyone.

Re: Population Question`
 

The majority of the world even now has a positive growth rate and until the last few decades all countries did

.Its hardly normal

Its not a big deal tho as you said.


A little inherant growth would be nice tho..

Re: Population Question`
 

I'm proposing some base pop growth for quite some time - but never got one of the devs actually even comment on it - be it positive or negative.

My suggestion is a pop growth depending on the number of starting pop the province has, which depends on terrain: As the pop number approaches 2x the starting pop, growth diminishes, if the pop drops below the starting pop, growth increases.
Growth scale would accelerate growth, but would not alter the max pop number. Slight death scale would mean stagnant pop around the starting pop number, heavy death scale would mean pop slowly dying off down to several hundreds or maybe 1-2000, where it would stay constant again (unless there's a pop-killing domain, o.c.).

FORMULA:
<font class="small">Code:</font><hr /><pre>
|2*[starting pop] |
|---------------- -1| *(1+[scales])*[growth%]*pop
| pop |
</pre><hr />

Re: Population Question`
 

How come Earth from a mere couple of 100,000 people, just in 4,000 BC (6,000 yrs ago), has grown to 6,000,000,000+ (6 billion in english money http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif) if population normally stays the same? Prediction for end of this century is 20 billion, I wonder if every person alive would still fit on the Isle of Wight then? http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/image...s/confused.gif

Nah, makes far more sense, like Nerfix says to have a small natural increase.

Re: Population Question`
 

I think 1%-5% yearly natural population increase would be best and least complicated. If devs think that games don't last long enough to make a difference on population increase then 1% in 1 year will do exactly that - make no difference in shorter games.

However, longer games do happen and may take for 10 years or more. Population that is mostly medieval (2 kids per family are common only in developed modern societies) and unaffected by outside events (pretender dominions, random events, pillage, etc.) would show some notable increase in population.

Re: Population Question`
 

Hm so population won't grow without + points in the growth scale? I gotta check this out, I guess I've played too much with Ermor, and never noticed this.
I thought that it is logical that the pop is growing without taking any points in the growth scale, also that it is growing faster when we take + points in the growth scale. This is rather odd!


*edit*

Just checked it. Pop just won't grow without +points in the growth scale. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/image...es/Injured.gif

Re: Population Question`
 

IIRC the devs commented on this once.
The gist of the response was "This is a world torn by a devastating war of gods, we want the population of the world to deplete".
EDIT: I did a search and was unable to find any such response, so don't consider what I said as the official dev response. I may have imagined it, or maybe it was someone else. Either way, that's one explanation to "no natural growth" http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/image...ies/tongue.gif

Re: Population Question`
 

Yes, but it seems a lot of the players would like there to be growth. Giving an "Inherent population growth" option at the start of the game would be good.

Re: Population Question`
 

You guys missed my point. Populations tend to stay the same in a natural environment. You throw in the invention of agriculture or other outside changes, and that is when population increases drastically (Or decreases sometimes).

^^the above was only a comment towards the "populations naturally grow" statement. There has been nothing natural about human population growth rates in the past several thousand years.

How this relates to the game... I see the dominion scales as those outside sources, as well as the other technologies, spells and random events in the game.

It makes sense to me considering the fantasy setting where pretender gods exist, that they would exert such great control over population just because of their prescence. So having the scales is not just an arbitrary number, it's your god's influence on that harvest, he/she is making it happen. If your god is not into the harvest thing (No growth scale or even death scale) then guess what, your population does not get to grow! Your producing just enough food/resources to maintain a constant population.

I don't feel it should be set up like "Our pretender god is a tool that didn't even care enough to give us a growth scale, but since we are human, we get to grow anyway".

Ofcourse this is saying that 0 growth/0 death does not even add a minor amount of pop increase.

Re: Population Question`
 

"Yes, but it seems a lot of the players would like there to be growth. Giving an "Inherent population growth" option at the start of the game would be good."

You are given this, it costs your pretender 40 points at the creation screen.

Re: Population Question`
 

We're also given the option to tweak the amount of gold, supplies and resources at the game setup! And guess what, these cost 0 points! And they apply for everyone.

Sure we can pay 40 points but with only 350 points to use it's more expensive than you make it to be.

Your argument is like saying "There shouldn't be a way to modify the gold generation in the world because you can always pay 40 design points and take Order"

Re: Population Question`
 

Sounds good to me http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif. Whats the point of having scales in the game if your just gonna counter them with those types of settings? Research is another I believe you can do that with.

Re: Population Question`
 

Well, we have been able to modify the amount of Gold in the world ever since Dominions 1. I guess it's that devs thought of giving the players a chance to play in a richer or poorer world.

In Dominions 3 we can change a lot of things at game setup that can be changed with scales. Gold, resources, supplies, even research. so why not population?

Give the players the option to do that. You don't have to use it.

Re: Population Question`
 

I wouldn't use it. But, I understand alot of you guys would, so I am not against it.

But most of this thread has been about there being positive population growth with a 0 growth scale because people "naturally" expand in population without any outside influences.

And that is what I don't want. To log into version 3.01 and be like, oh well, growth 0 is really growth 1, GG shrapnel forums, gonna use my 40 points elsewhere.

Re: Population Question`
 

Just as a small reference, it takes Growth+1 (+0.2% population, +2% income [and an irrelevant boost to supplies]) 49 turns in a province to bring in the same income as Order+1.

Re: Population Question`
 

Growth scale also seems to affect the types of "Something unexpected has happened in this province" messages I get in my games. I don't have any tested proof or references to back it up, but it seems the scales affect my random events.

Re: Population Question`
 

I think that terrain types should have an effect on population growth (say farmlands +0,2, plains/forest +0,1, swamp -0,1, waste -0,2, freshwater +0,1, with fort +0,1 ; or something directly based on supplies) as well as the actual population (something like province with 30k+ pop -0,1, province under 5k +0,1, province under 2k +0,2). Say you control a farmland province which has lost much of its population. The 1k remaining people have lots of rich lands to exploit, logically their number should grow fast. In the other hand I don't think that 35k guys trying to survive with the rare supplies of a waste should have an automatic growth.

But I don't really think it's worth the effort to implement this kind of system, and without it having just the effects of the growth scale is better than an arbitrary automatic growth.

Re: Population Question`
 

Well, maybe their birth rate will increase, but bear in mind that babies are not productive at all, they don't work at the farms to generate supply, nor do they pay taxes, and they take many years to grow to be productive :O

Re: Population Question`
 

Scales DO affect events. As an example, wealthy princes don't die in Growth dominion and immigrating people don't just suddenly decide to appear in a province with Death scale. Similarly, trolls under the bridge won't attack travelers in Drain dominion, but it's much more rare or perhaps impossible to find gems and magic items.

Re: Population Question`
 

The problem as I see it, is that (at least in Dom 2, I'm still waiting for my dom3 copy) if you want to take a God thematically connected to Life, you will have a very hard time - as far as I can gather from what I have read, in MP you would actually be signing your death. If you wage war with a death-scale nation, they wave wasted their provinces in such a manner that you have no way of repopulating them, so occupying them is just loading yourself with dead weight - literally. I don't know if the answer to this is natural growing population rates, but there should be *some* way for life/nature related gods to repopulate dead lands in a *feasible* way. As it now stands, the best thing that such a god can hope for is to win the dominion war on his own lands. Hardly a feat worthy of a would-be god.

Re: Population Question`
 

I think rituals or other ways to repopulate provinces should be considered, with effects proportionnal to growth scale to make it a good option, but limited to provinces under x population (to avoid to see these rituals chain used on the most populated provinces)

In example a nature ritual, "ritual of fertility" multiplying by 10 the effect of growth scale on the target province for the turn may be a good idea for this (and/or the same as global enchant, and/or, why not, an astral spell summoning population from a parallel plane, adding a number of pop proportionnal to magic and growth scales, or a "summer of love" fire global augmenting the effect of growth in hot seasons.

Even with this kind of rituals, repopulation would be far slower than killing people with a death dominion + tax at 200 and pillages, and cost a lot of gems.

Another possibility may be a demobilization order, making demobilized soldiers become normal citizen (but it would be a big advantage to order/productivity and luck dominions more than growth ones).

Re: Population Question`
 

Ugh. We need to think about population in this game as staying static because each province has already reached its capacity. Each turn is just a month's time, so it would take something like 240 turns for one short generation. There is no technology to speak of, and relatively speaking, the real world didn't start to explode in population until the industrial revolution. This isn't SimCity or an RTS, where you start unpopulated; it isn't Civilization where each turn is twenty years and population growth is balanced by unrest. You are only imagining the "logical" need for population growth based on other games which aren't analagous at all. This is like complaining that we can't research gunpowder and communism because, you know, it happens in the real world and other games.

I admit it'd be nice to be nice to be able to have a population movement feature, where you could get them to repopulate an area with tax incentives and nice scales. But do you really want more micromanagement and tools to crush the AI? I'd rather smash face with a fully-equipped Pak-Ur (which was fun until he decided to defect to Tien Chi).

Re: Population Question`
 

Haha, I like the Summer of Love idea. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

It would require that Lady of Love is changed to Fire/Nature though... http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

Re: Population Question`
 

Again, having more babies (fertility and love) should not increase the population of a province, as these babies will take many years (and each year is 12 turns!) to mature into full-blown members of their society.
Remember that popluation represents the working population, that population which gives you supply and taxes, not just how many people reside in the province.

Re: Population Question`
 

If a ritual can increase fertility it can also accelerate the aging process or make able to work unproductive people. We are in a magic world here, the idea is not to simulate the pyramid of ages (even if it may be good for balance with the aging system http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif ). If you prefer replace "fertility" by "majority" and say that the ritual initiate more youngs people than usual and make them productive adults.

Re: Population Question`
 

Pop will grow if you have no unrest and lower than 100% taxes, i believe.

Re: Population Question`
 

Population only grows if the province has a positive growth scale.