Population Question`

[Agrajag]

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

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.

[Foodstamp]

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.

[Endoperez]

Foodstamp said:
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.

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.

[Twan]

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.

[Agrajag]

Twan said:
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.

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

[Sorlakind]

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.

[Twan]

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).

[Morkilus]

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).

[Nerfix]

Haha, I like the Summer of Love idea.

It would require that Lady of Love is changed to Fire/Nature though...

[Agrajag]

Twan said:
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.

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.